Story time

Less than two weeks ago, the Guardian published David Conn's seemingly explosive expose about Michelle Mone. The article revealed evidence suggesting that the Tory peer lobbied ministers to award lucrative contracts to a PPE business and then she and her children personally benefited from a £29 million share of the profits. And yet now, depressingly, the story seems to have disappeared almost without a trace. Even on the day itself, the Guardian mysteriously didn't feature in BBC News' daily round-up of the front pages.

In a piece for The Fence, Seamas O'Reilly observes that "[s]ome stories, it seems, have just enough currency to survive the ever-tightening gyre of the 24-hour news cycle, while others barely scratch the sides as they reach escape velocity and pass out the other end, unremarked upon". Conducting a mini-investigation of his own, he asked three journalists - John Lanchester, Ian Urbina and Oliver Bullough - to talk from personal experience about "what happens when their hard-earned scoop lands not with a bang, but with a thud".

Why this happens, they agree, is baffling. In many cases, it's probably a matter of timing; sometimes, events coalesce to create the necessary critical mass for a story to take off, as in Urbina's example of the way that the Russian invasion of Ukraine suddenly opened the floodgates for investigative pieces on kleptocracy that could and should have been written sooner.

A key factor in stories gaining traction, they suggest, is often some kind of human or relatable element - which is challenging because, as Lanchester notes, the issues that need to be addressed are very often systemic and structural rather than a matter of individual wrongdoing. Urbina also argues that stories need to genuinely be stories, "with a narrative arc and maybe a character" and "a beginning, middle and end; a sense of motion, drama". We're not talking about sexing things up here - just about framing the detail in a form that will be more palatable to a wide audience. Or, as Bullough puts it, "what I try and do is to turn spinach into saag aloo, or a spinach quiche".

Bullough also talks briefly about the complicating involvement of lawyers - both those aggressively representing the powerful and notoriously litigious and those cautiously protecting publications from the threat of legal action. The Mone story has, you would think, got the requisite elements to fly - so the fact that it hasn't suggests that it's being suffocated behind the scenes by legal wrangling. Will the truth out? Time will tell.