Did this marketing company forget what happened to Cook's Source when they screwed with the little people? The internet doesn't respond kindly to that type of bullying:
> Maybe "she" deserves a serious wake-up call, but "they" most certainly do not.
Being a two-person operation is probably why they ripped off most if not all of their content.
"Craftier Internet denizens started to research more of Cooks Source's publications, discovering that other articles could be lifted from The Food Network, Martha Stewart, NPR and even Disney."
Yes, but the actual incident and blog post was weeks ago, and this is the kind of combination of thing that rags like to pick up on-- harshly-treated victim, forgotten by an up-and-coming company that doesn't know how to spin PR properly.
This article raises red flags on the author's credibility. This looks less like a truthful account of a story, and more like a frustrated small company who had a partnership go bad, and are trying to defame their partner.
A whole web site, with linkbait headlines, set up to tell one story? Their about page doesn't even say they are trying to start a discussion... it just rehashes the story. With a few other pages to give a token appearance that they will tell more stories later.
I am sure there was fault on both sides, and I am equally sure the other side would have a vastly different story.
But this whole site sure looks like juvenile vengeance.
'A single article, quoting sources, and even giving the founder a chance to respond right in the article itself, is not "internet vigilantism".'
Yes, it is. This isn't meticulously researched. This is not a 60 Minutes exposé. Did Anthony do any fact checking? Did he spend time researching the company and verifying these people's stories?
No, he wrote an article in the Fox News style. Who needs fact-checking when you can just get people from two opposing camps to contradict each other?
It was gossip. It worked. It's no better than an article about how such-and-such celebrity yelled at a waitress and made her cry.
'In your books, me blogging about a terrible previous employer is "vigilantism".'
Again, yes, by definition.
If you put your name to it I'd think it was distasteful and a little petty, assuming we're talking about bad management and not something criminal.
If you didn't, I'd think you were a coward.
(This is my last response, so you can have the last word if you care to.)
I think that was more about trolls rather than big company shenanigans. In any case there are some errors in that video that I pointed out in a previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9442161
So Ben Smith lied, right? I'm surprised the Times piece doesn't highlight that fact.
> An internal review by BuzzFeed last week found three instances when editors deleted posts after advertisers or employees from the company’s business side complained about their content
> Mr. Smith later reinstated the two posts, saying he had overreacted when asking editors to delete them. He told staff members in a note that the posts had been erased after he took issue with their opinionated tone and not because of complaints from advertisers.
It didn't last time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18332918 (7 months ago). It's the exact same story, except the victim there got his story published at a major photography site and roused enough rabble that KitSplit ended up reimbursing him for the low low cost of an endorsement at the end.
Strange article. Did someone at the executive level of this company commit some faux pas against the author or editor of this site? There's no meat here, just a sirt of half-assed execution of a once-off "vendetta" of some kind.
Have you reached out to anyone? https://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2016/news-tips/ would be my first place to go. It even specifically calls out "Here is proof that this company is conducting itself unethically" as an example, and asks for evidence corroborating the story. So if you have it, that would seem to be the place.
Having said that, I was more wondering if the people doing the threatening could be turned to better use. They surely aren't in it for the warm fuzzies, and if they're good at digging perhaps they could be convinced to do it for the good guys.
I would really appreciate more information from NPR on why the story was retracted and what, specifically, was wrong with the story. NPR's statement mentions that the site that was allegedly defaming Jefferey Ervine was never contacted and that the author of that site was maybe not really the author and they weren't contacted either. In fact, reading through the retraction, I was left with the suspicion that the _only_ person that NPR talked to was Jeffery Ervine himself.
Jeffery Ervine is now the president of Bridgit.com which... Well, even after looking at the site it's not clear to me what they do. It kind of sounds like they work with schools to combat bullying[0] and there's a page on the site covering the same material as the NPR piece.[1] But the NPR piece does end up spending a lot of time on Ervine and the story wraps up with a plug for his new company.[2]
Without more information from NPR, my first thought is that Ervine mis-represented his story in an attempt to drum-up publicity for his new company and NPR was sufficiently embarrassed that they have removed the story from their site. Bu that's just me guessing, since this retraction has practically no useful information.
I've been contacted too. I'm not planning on removing my article either. It feels like a bluff. I find it odd that their first course of action is to threaten legal action. Not exactly the way to win friends and influence people. If they really wanted to get on the right side of this they would acknowledge what they did and then approach people with an apology. Meh.
Affliate link and content sales capitalizing on trendy animosity. Hard to say if the story actually happened or it's more of a tall tale to make money.
Flagged -- HN can do better than this. That was a terrible article, and does more to damage VentureBeat's credibility than anything else. Here is an excerpt from the now-deleted article:
"Of course, we have no proof whether TechCrunch was really part of this sort of deal-making. But at least, according to one reading, this start-up thinks that’s the way things work in Silicon Valley."
Translation: in email correspondence they had with a founder, they figured out shoehorn into what he said the idea that he thought he could trade favors for TC coverage. They then wrote up a story slamming this founder and TC, apparently before talking to anybody.
I don't work in the media, but it feels like a serious breach of trust to write an article indicting someone over a flimsy interpretation of something they say to you in a private email.
It's also pretty awful to see places like Wired, Tech Crunch, and Engadget had blindly reposted the PR clickbait material without any scrutiny. Even when those that did eventually 'update' their article it was tacked on as a minor note, no mention that the photos and video were digitally altered. A real expose from any of these publications would've had enough force Kickstarter to action.
About ten years ago I was working for a company that was featured in a (fairly glowing) article in the NYT. We linked to it from our media page, and a month or two later received a similar letter from their legal department instructing us to either remove the link, or pay them some outrageous amount of money (something like $4500, if I recall correctly). So we changed the link to an "I'm feeling lucky" search on Google that took you directly to the article. Never heard about it again.
All kidding aside, it seems almost criminal that a company would create such damaging news as a way of generating publicity (speaking, of course, about LivingSocial). I just can't fathom what would drive someone to do this, unless someone who was leaving LivingSocial wanting to spread a lot of damaging news about their old employer.
I did see it, however it seems to be just speculation about what is happening. I don't want to base all my opinion on that. Some of these are rather heavy accusations, like the nepotism between Steve Klabnik and Ashley Williams, or that Steve Klabnik smeared Amazon because they didn't give Ashley Williams a job. I don't want to give them weight when the only source seems to be a pseudonymous post.
http://techland.time.com/2010/11/17/cooks-source-magazine-co...
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