National news is a tough racket. The outfits with the resources and expertise to report original items have a lofty position as the ones breaking the news. It’s probably only a slight exaggeration to say that 95% of the news from DC comes from the Washington Post, The New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, AP, Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, Politico, The Daily Beast, and Axios. The same with New York City to the extent that it remains a base of power for Trump’s minions and as the nation’s media and finance capital. Everything flows from those sources, both laterally – as in NBC writes an original article based on a report in the NYT, ABC breaks something and Axios picks it up, etc – and through percolation – RawStory publishes an article from a Washington Post investigation, The Hill does the same with a CNN report, etc.

Now just because those players dominate the most important sectors does not mean they’re the only game in town as far as content aggregation goes – there’s local papers and TV affiliates, blogs aplenty, not to mention the social media posts and press releases by the players in the news themselves. But when we’re talking about the biggest story of the year, the one that has not happened yet, it’s going to come from one of those top dogs and then everyone else will rush in a frenzy to be second place. It’s that silver medal, the bragging rights that would come with it, and the fear of not having them that’s driving my anxiety these days.

Regular readers of this site are well acquainted with my insatiable drive to aggregate the news first. I constantly harp on our victories and defeats against The Hill in the race to be first among us to report big news. I think the wins – the FBI’s raid on Rudy, Trump banned from Twitter for life, Matt Gaetz under investigation for sex trafficking, the #Dumbkirk disaster, Trump infected with Coronavirus, Brad Parscale’s suicide attempt, Texas lawsuit against swing states rejected by the Supreme Court, just to name a few – outweigh our defeats – Rush dead, Bannon arrested, NY Times gets Trump’s taxes, the MLB All-Star game getting relocated (they only beat us by 2 minutes, but still). In the end however, none of those will be as important as the biggest one of them all:

I’m keeping that in my drafts folder and will be able to post it within 10 seconds of seeing the initial reports on Twitter, so I better be fucking dead if that timestamp when the story is published is not earlier than The Hill’s timestamp on their same story. I will be extra pissed if I’m driving or I’m stuck in a subway tunnel or at a toddler gym class and have missed the moment to tell you before you read it on any other site (Twitter, CNN, etc excepted of course). To lose out to The Hill on that would be such a demoralizing defeat. Sure, I’d get over it sooner or later, but it would very much hurt the day of. It’s only going to happen for the first time once. You would all tell me it’s no big deal and that I should shut up and stop moping about my petty one-sided rivalry with The Hill, blah blah blah, but getting there first is an important piece of National Zero’s value, second only to the community and your ability to speak more freely than you are most other places. Knowing that a lot of you check the news at National Zero before you check the other guys is itself a statement of that importance. Making sure we deliver on that, a great community, and stupid bullshit like the BTS-McDonald’s “meal” from Wednesday is our mission and we cannot let ourselves off easy if we fail.

We beat The Hill on that McDonald’s one by the way. National Zero’s “McDonald’s hotly anticipated marketing collaboration with worldwide K-Pop sensation BTS debuts Wednesday” was posted at 12:50 PM EDT, while The Hill’s “McDonald’s unveils collaboration with BTS” was published almost two hours later at 2:48 PM EDT. Not like we’re keeping score or anything though.