Reporter Steve Bagnall played a blinder yesterday to secure our front page scoop for today's edition - the first interview with the pathologist at the centre of the biopsy blunders at Wrexham Maelor Hospital.
The story of the cock up, in which cancer sufferers were wrongly given a clean bill of health ,"broke" at 10.30 am yesterday. That was the embargo deadline the hospital trust put on a story which was circulated to the media the night before. Now, a 10.30 am is about as much use to a morning newspaper as a chocolate fireguard. In pre-internet times we would have been left sitting on our thumbs for the best part of 21 hours waiting for the next edition to be published before we could reach our readers with this story.
dailypost.co.uk gave us the chance to break the news simultaneously with the BBC and the wesbite of the evening newspaper in Wrexham. But the fact remains that our biggest audience (and in fact the biggest audience for any print publication in North Wales) is the print edition of the Daily Post. We tried without success on Tuesday night to have the embargo deadline brought forward to earlier on the day so we could run the story on Wednesday along with everyone else.
So we were a bit cheesed off to to say the least. But as I said, we were able to get into the mix yesterday thanks to the website. And we did something very important in today's edition.
We took a story that was already in the public domain, moved it forward dramatically and analysed it more thoroughly than anyone else. Steve, news editor Debbie James and her deputy Rob Davies deserve much credit for this, as does deputy editor Andy Gilpin who designed the fabulous front page and the "spread" on pages four and five.
We like to be first - and we also like to be the best.
