Fun with local weekly

Nothing you can do legally, though.

1. You have no proof.
2. What you put out is for public consumption.
3. Unless they're copying stories word-for-word, there's not much to be done, short of finding ways to fuck with them.

 

Go to their office undercover and upper deck them.

 

There may be a slight violation of copyright law, but given that would be extremely hard to prove and the damages would be slight, no lawyer would probably want to take it to court.

The best way is to find ways to fuck with them. Maybe call in false news tips to them, but don't put them in your paper.

 

Wow, this is an eye-opener. They're never going to stop this for the entire football season.

 

Come on. You're a journalist. You can't think of five or six quick ways to fuck with them to the point where they stop doing it? Hell, if you're that concerned about it, write a column.

 

I'm not sure if I'm in the right frame of mind to write a column, but I guess I could think of a few ways:
Way No. 1 - Murderous rampage with a knife.
Way No. 2 - Murderous rampage with a gun.
Way No. 3 - Murderous rampage with two guns.
Way No. 4 - Bomb.
Way No. 5 - A civilized conversation over tea.

 

Try them all, and let us know which one works best for you. Just bring it up to the people at the paper or as Doc said, write a column. They may copy that as well, but at least you would know then, unless you did steps 1 through 4.

 

At least you're not overreacting.

 

What do your bosses say? Let them call the weekly. Do you all have an attorney on retainer who can write a cease and desist letter? But the bottom line is if the bosses don't care it doesn't matter.

 

It's really quite easy to come up with a couple things that would get them to stop pretty quickly.

You actually don't even have to go to your bosses for some of them. And there would be no violence in any of these.

 

They're in no rush. Don't an attorney cost money?
How unprofessional is it to call and bitch them out?

I was thinking of just calling their publisher, but I'm convinced that wouldn't do jack shit.

 

A bit off the original post, but what about this situation.

I went to a media day and did a pair of stories on the teams in our area. The previous week, I did a story on each of these teams starting practice.

In our prep tab this year, I didnt do anything on production or see anything that went into the final product, except the stuff I wrote up.

I whip out the tab and notice that School A's story (which I didnt write) is about 75% cut/pasted from the pair of stories I did by our esteemed sports editor. Same quotes, same punctuation in those quotes, same words I used outside of quotes (with the exception of one word per graf).

How PO'ed should I be?