Here’s exactly how it feels to be scooped by a source

Jared Yates Sexton had the surreal experience this week of being scooped by a source.

Sexton, who has been working on the Trump-Russia story for a year now and shared his complete shock with Twitter upon learning that Donald Trump Jr. had just voluntarily tweeted out the information he had been searching for. His series of tweets, though they have been lampooned by some, capture the pain of a journalist who pursued an investigative story only to have the “smoking gun” revealed by a key player in the story.

Here are a few of his tweets:

While the events Sexton described are bizarre considering the circumstances and the seriousness of the issue, this is a common frustration in the age of the Internet.

Whether it is Twitter, Facebook or Email blasts, sources and officials have new ways to communicate directly with the public that work around journalists. The frustration of working on a story only to have the information released by one of the sources themselves is all to real and increasingly common.