I’m the IT infrastructure director at a service-based ERP software provider.
The sales guys, and, to a lesser degree, the development and customer care folks, do most of the winning and losing. It’s my job to ensure that our clients are mostly unaware of my team’s existence.
Both my job as an attorney, and my hobby as an illegal gamecock fighter.
That’s not the sole standard by which every single story is measured, but it is a key one in many instances because our customers are financial companies who want to know about potentially market-moving news as soon as possible and don’t care about the source. Coupled with constant pressure to lower costs, often by cutting back on subscriptions to news services (i.e. making traders choose between their Reuters screen or my company’s screen), if Reuters is doing a better job of informing them, the customers might not hesitate to get rid of my company’s screens.
So if we can show that we’re regularly beating Reuters on key news, such as announcements of interest-rate changes by central banks, it’s very helpful for the sales folks. And for any journalist, scooping the competition is a matter of pride, of course.