Think of it like this. You are sitting in a bar and are ease dropping on other people's conversations. Two people are talking about a treasure buried out in the woods. One man gives the other a map, and he decides that he will go dig up the treasure tomorrow. You decide you will go out and dig up random parts of the woods for it tonight, effectively stealing out from under him.
The people talking are the gossip, the map is the random event one of them received, and you stealing the treasure is just some random player stumbling upon it and getting it before the person who earned the gossip and re.