Ira Rosen remembers when news made money. He is a producer at 60 Minutes in the United States and is regaling a room of journalists at the Investigative Reporters and Editors Conference in San Francisco with tales from the show’s glory days, tales about its eye-watering profits and how the journalists working on the show would spend the spoils:

We all were very competitive with each other, we all wanted a leg up, so we played a game called airport roulette. You go to the airport, you throw your credit card down and you say ‘next flight out’. It didn’t matter where it was going, you had to take the next flight out. If two flights down was San Francisco, but the next flight out was Wichita, you have to take Wichita. You pull in to Wichita, you look at all the papers, if there is a good story call the person involved, stay overnight, you work it. If there is nothing, you get back to the counter and say ‘next flight out’. Inevitably, in two or three days you come back with a couple of ideas.