The plot thickens over the Tampa Tribune‘s theft of bloggers’ work:
- Tampabay 10 interviews Tommy Duncan of Sticks of Fire about his own experiences. Janet Coats, Tampa Tribune‘s Vice President of News, replies the whole thing was a “technical glitch.”
- After Zen Comix bills the newspaper $400 for stolen comics, Pushing Rope sends in its own invoice. The last Pushing Rope blog post run by TBO.com without permission? A post about the Tribune running columns without paying. Oh, the irony.
- Local bloggers tell me TBO.com may have taken posts from the local blog aggregator TampaBLAB for the last three months. Notable point: bloggers must sign up to TampaBLAB to have excerpts of their blogs posted on that site; TBO.com took blog posts without any such agreement.
Peter Schorsch says:
Alex:
Is there a way to see how many blog posts of mine ended up on their site?
Who did they send an invoice to?
Alex Pickett says:
It won’t be easy since TBO never used any of our names or names of our blogs. From what is coming out behind the scenes, I understand that most if not all posts were taken from TampaBLAB between April 30 and July 31, although I’ve seen posts from August on there.
I would suggest Googling the titles of your posts plus “TBO” or “Tampa Tribune.” All stolen posts share these characteristics: Your title was used as the TBO.com title; the text “Opinion TampaBLAB” appeared under the title; the text (and images) of the beginning* of your article appeared; and
a hyperlink at the bottom read “Full Story>>>”, and linked through TampaBLAB straight to your blog.
I did some for you and couldn’t find anything.
Does anyone else have any ideas on how to find these posts and/or if you saw any of Peter’s blog posts on TBO.com?
Alex Pickett says:
Oh and it looks like people are sending invoices to Tampa Tribune webmaster Loren Omoto.
Robin 'Roblimo' Miller says:
Yes, you should absolutely send an invoice to TBO.com if they have used your material beyond hed/lede/link. I know there was a famous Shakespeare line, “First, we don’t pay the writers,” which I may have remembered wrong, but still… Media General is a for-profit corporation. The fact that they aren’t capable of developing profitable ad products for their websites isn’t your problem. If you write for them either on purpose or inadvertently, you should get paid.
Peter Schorsch says:
I just got off the phone with Janet Coats. Alex, give me a call at 631 764 4471.
Wow, did they steal a lot of my work.
Kelli Garner says:
Thats very good to know… thanks
yanton says:
a good read, thanks for this post