Sometimes news stories take a lot of boring, tedious research work. Some stories take a lot of ground work and personnel to investigate and follow up and may involve such techniques as hiding a photographer in the back of a van for days on end in order to snap a picture of an elusive subject of a news story in a compromising or incriminating position. Any older ‘inky’ from the newspapers or other news media can probably tell you that only very rarely does a decent journalist or reporter have a story that just drops into their lap. Normally news stories, if they are to be credible, take a lot of checking on, but occasionally, just occasionally mind you, a reporter finds that the story arriving via a chance encounter.

Avi Yemini, a reporter for Trnews.com, is one such lucky reporter to end up with a big story, a scoop, that landed with serendipity in his lap. Whilst Mr Yemini was covering the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests a while back. He, as is his usual modus operandi, was approaching random people in Hong Kong and asking them about the pro-democracy protests. On one occasion he approached a Caucasian gentleman, a Swiss expat, to ask him a few questions, only to be quite roughly verbally rebuffed.

Mr Yemini did a little digging and found that this was not any ordinary expat from Switzerland working in the many industries and commercial activities that have bases in Hong Kong. It turns out that the guy who refused to talk to Mr Yemeni appears to be a apologist for the Chinese Communist Party regime in Beijing. The apologist has appeared on Chinese state media, at pro-China rallies and internet activism to support the Chinese Communists.

Watch the video below and see a brilliant example of a journalist getting a scoop story out of what at first may have seemed like a less than interesting chance encounter.