“You follow this and you’ll be the next Woodward and Bernstein.”

From the late 1980s until about the mid 1990s of my newspaper career, it seemed someone with a news tip said something similar to this statement at least once a month. 

A person would call the office, “I gotta story that’s as big as Watergate. You’ll be like, um, Woodwood and Bernstein, them All the President’s guys.” 

Or someone carrying a thick pile of dog-eared, Xeroxed documents or papers would drop by the office – “like Woodward and Bernstein.” 

Or someone encountered at an event, usually whispering, “this thing is going to blow up and you’ll be the one doing the dynamiting like Woodward and Bernstein.”

I wasn’t the only reporter receiving such calls and hearing the references to The Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who rose to fame uncovering the Watergate scandal that toppled the presidency of Richard Nixon and whose journalistic exploits were covered in the book “All the President’s Men,” then a movie of the same name starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the reporters respectively.

The biggest way to get any reporter to roll his or her eyes back then was for a caller, usually wishing to remain anonymous, to say, “this is as big as Watergate. … You’ll be like Woodward and Bernstein.”

We would usually think, yeah, your sewage issue is going to be as big as bringing down an American president. Though we didn’t say that, of course. Well, not most of us anyway.

The recent 50th anniversary of the Watergate break in – June 17, 1972 – when five men were arrested breaking into the national Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., on the orders of someone in the Nixon administration reminded me of those past Woodward and Bernstein news tips. 

And those types of calls weren’t just made to The Valdosta Daily Times but small town newspapers across America. Ask almost any newspaper reporters/editors who worked from the mid-1970s to roughly the mid-1990s and they will likely confirm receiving such a news tip, not once but several times.

Usually, the tip revolved around sewage, or perceived public malfeasance, or someone wrongly charged by police, or even a dog tearing up a neighbor’s yard. The calls were often from someone who refused to give their name, or wished to remain anonymous, or wouldn’t go on the record, or who had no proof or evidence, or the evidence was haphazardly collected in a manila folder.

And while the Woodward and Bernstein reference was the quickest way to bring out the skeptic in a reporter, we did our due diligence. We were young. We were hungry. We listened to the full account. We waded through the documents. We made phone calls. We followed up. 

Most cases led to a dead end. If there was a “there” there, we couldn’t find it no matter our efforts. But in some cases, the tip led to some fine reporting. It may not have led to the fall of an American president but it revealed wrongdoing by doctors, lawyers, police, etc.

And these stories were reported through the dogged determination of journalists following the same practices that a viewer would see in “All the President’s Men” – repeated phone calls, call backs, knocking on doors, finding and researching documents, being hung up on, or people refusing to see the reporter, or making the reporter wait, etc. 

All this while working on the daily coverage of local crime, city and county meetings, feature stories and other regular newspaper stories. Most newspaper reporters are still covering a regular beat while looking into the “Woodward and Bernstein”-type stories.

And if we couldn’t find any evidence or credible statements to lead a story to print, we often heard the same thing next from the Woodward and Bernstein tipsters.

“Well, if you won’t tell my story, I guess ’60 Minutes’ will.”

Good luck with that. Though we didn’t say that, of course. Well, not most of us anyway.

Dean Poling is an editor with The Valdosta Daily Times and editor of The Tifton Gazette.