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First: Attention Colbert County. There will be an important announcement coming for all Colbert Citizens no later than Monday. It's going to be a whole new ball game in one election!
-()-
When the Shoals Insider came on the
local scene around 2006 or 2007, there had previously been nothing
like it in the area. The SI was begun by a local man using the pen
name Larry Baker; I know his identity, but Shoalanda wouldn’t want
it published it here.
The SI created quite a sensation and
for a while flourished. For whatever reason, posts slackened and
never picked up. Some days, the site was down altogether due to
non-payment of site hosting. Two individuals who at one time helped
blog here decided to start up a real online news magazine. Pen N
Sword debuted and a short time later, another enterprising pair began
the Quad Cities Daily, an online daily newspaper. Perhaps Mr. Baker
saw the handwriting on the wall and his site went months without new
posts.
Finally, a local writer who sometimes
worked with Baker began making a few posts a week, most culled from
WAFF News which the SI called a “partner.” As I’m typing this,
the SI site is down. So why am I writing this?
Shoalanda has previously done a blog on
the site Busted N the Shoals stealing material from the QCD in the
form of mug shots for which the QCD had paid and enhanced
and...watermarked. Yes, the QCD watermark was even left intact when
Busted published the mugshots. Lazy or just didn’t care?
A few days ago we read a PNS article on
a local woman who had at one time been on the area’s most wanted
list. The young woman had been encouraged by her family to turn
herself in; in fact, the family had given PNS an exclusive in hope of
finding their daughter.
Now the young woman is on the ropes
again and facing serious charges. PNS apparently had discarded their
original article, but went to Busted to retrieve their copy. Why? You
guessed it. Busted had stolen their original article word for word.
How is this relevant to SI? It seems
Busted also calls itself a “partner” to WAFF. Hmm.
You might not like what you read on
Shoalanda, or PNS, or the QCD, but except for the common press
releases, all material is composed by us, all of whom are such
excellent writers we don’t need to steal. Ahem!
While I’m on the subject, and while
Shoalanda has already felt a disturbance in the force, I’ll relate
another little story about the Shoals Insider. A few years ago, a
local man was arrested for what I’ll just call disorderly conduct.
The SI was the first to report on the arrest and went into detail to
add that the man, quite in his cups, had exposed himself to children.
The next day, the story was picked up
by WAFF (SI’s news partner?). There was a little added, but the
details about the indecent exposure were taken almost verbatim from
SI. The next day, Shoalanda mentioned the incident. I’m sure she
fully believed since WAFF had reported facts gathered from the
incident report and not just taken the SI article at face value.
A few months pass, and the arrested man
hires an attorney. The original report does not mention any indecent
exposure. Both WAFF and Shoalanda removed their articles. The Shoals
Insider? The article was still up the last time I looked. Since this
is a blog, there’s no real “journalism” involved, but I know
WAFF obviously practices a high degree of journalistic
responsibility. So why didn’t the SI remove the article when it was
pointed out that most of it wasn’t true? I sense a personal
vendetta.
Bailey
