This is Leicestershire --It is the one question every Leicester City fan wants the answer to during the summer – who are they going to sign? At the Mercury, we try to provide the answers and, through investigative work, try to keep fans abreast of how the club's transfer policy is working out.
But it is not easy and is becoming increasingly difficult in the age of social media.
To start with, City like to conduct their transfer dealings strictly behind closed doors. Until a deal is signed, sealed and delivered, the club does not comment.
This has not always been the case but, in the modern era, it is understandable. They do not want their targets becoming public in case it alerts other clubs to that player's availability and provokes a rival bid, which in turn drives up prices, both of the transfer fee and of the player's personal demands.
"When there is something to report, we will do so and not before," has become a mantra of City manager Nigel Pearson when he is asked about deals during transfer windows.
To keep everything else under lock and key, only a handful of people at the club know the identity of targets and which players are heading for the exit door.
Football director Andrew Neville is at the heart of this, holed up in his bunker at the King Power Stadium, negotiating and doing deals with clubs and agents, only to occasionally appear, probably in disguise, to blink at the sunlight before descending once more into catacombs of the stadium to continue his work.
That makes life difficult for those trying to report on transfer dealings, but there are other ways to find snippets of information.
While it may be lockdown at City, other clubs are a little more open and journalists on other regional papers have become a source.
While local journalists adhere to the strict media policy of their club, national journalists have more licence to call contacts inside a club without fear of recrimination, so they can become a source too, but obviously they want to break the stories they find first.
These sources are normally the most reliable.
Next up are the players' agents. If you can find out which agent represents a player and get their number, they can, sometimes, be a source of information. Some of them are open to talking, others choose not to comment and some just do not pick up the phone.
But any 'tip-offs' you get from agents should be corroborated by another source because agents will always have their own agenda, as they are looking out for their client's interests. That is what they are paid to do.
Finally, and this is where it can get really tricky, is social media as a source.
There are thousands of Twitter feeds, blogs, forum users and other sites that claim to be in the know – and sometimes they are, so cannot be ignored. However, 99 per cent of the stuff online is complete and utter rubbish, and it can be a laborious process trying to sort the wheat from the chaff – and there is a hell of a lot of chaff.
"I have a mate who works in the club shop and he has seen so-and-so at the ground." We have all read these little snippets.
Some genuinely believe them, some just get a kick out of making up the rumours and laugh at the reaction. Or even better, start the rumours and then watch as a 'reputable' news source runs it.
However, occasionally there are some who do have correct information, and local papers do track the ones who have been proven to know some information.
However, again it must be backed up by another source, and these should only be used as initial leads, therefore the reporter must get used to going down many dead ends.
In this modern age of instant media, it is virtually impossible for local daily newspapers like the Mercury to break transfer exclusives. The amount of times a reporter may think he has got one, only for it to break on Twitter or another website, is incredible.
We have one policy on transfer stories at the Mercury, if we can't be first, make sure we are right.
That is the key. When it comes to transfer stories, we want to know there is definitely truth in what we print and that it has come from a reputable source.
We want Mercury readers to trust what we print. Reported by This is 2 days ago.