A superb joint effort by The Mirror and The Guardian to expose the fascinating Dominic Cummings story – and a sign of things to come.
You should expect supposedly rival newsgroups to link up in this way more and more often. Doing so pools stretched resources and increases impact and it makes it very hard for the targets of the story to simply dismiss the allegations as the work of one mean-spirited paper.
The Guardian has already done several investigations in league with ITV.
The pairing I really want to see is The Guardian and the Daily Mail.
These organisations loath each other. So a joint investigation would really make the point that there are lots of things on which the nation is presently united, and that if you are on other side of that, you should expect to get absolutely hammered.
Hacks have always worked together informally. So if a bruising legal and PR battles manages to persuade my editor to scrap a story, well, I’ll just give everything I’ve got to a mate at, say, The Times.
If entire news organisations are now going to collaborate officially in ways that hacks have always done casually, that presents an entire new challenge for the flak trade.
Business leaders behaving badly might think that being outed in one paper is survivable.
Being outed in all of them is surely not.
