Gornal News & Goings On

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Express and Star's journalism the easy way (updated 14/7/03 - article reinstated following legal advice) What does an award winning multi-million pound newspaper do when they are short of a decent story? Why, they steal one from a small local web site of course - and then pretend they didn't. Yesterday we received an email from Barry Clarke, whose mother Maud has recently celebrated her 100th birthday, which featured on the front page of the Express and Star. Barry informed us that last Saturday (8th February) the newspaper followed this up by printing the story of the Sunshine pub which appeared in Yampy's history channel some months ago. Anyone reading the article will immediately spot that the details have been lifted straight from Yampy - yet nobody from the Express and Star contacted us and our site is not even mentioned. "It's not that we mind the photographs appearing" Barry told us "but even if you have given them permission, I would have thought that they would have given credit to Yampy". The newspaper is currently running a 'Good Old Days' series, and it seemed to us that if they felt that this was perfectly acceptable practice then dozens of other Yampy stories that we have done the hard work on would soon find its way onto their pages; after all, it's so much easier for a journalist to surf the net in his office and steal other people's work, than to get out of his chair and find a story. We rang the newsdesk to complain and spoke to the hack involved. He initially denied that the photographs and information came from the site, stating that he obtained it directly from the family. However, he later admitted that he had right-clicked on the images and taken the other details used in the story. An Express and Star spokesperson later told us that they believed they had permission from the family to use the photographs and had simply been a bit lazy in taking them from Yampy rather than getting the originals. She also told us that they had assumed that Yampy had taken the captions from the family. This is odd, because it means that the reporter ignored the paragraph beginning: Barry knew everyone on the photo but cannot remember all of their names, and believes that many of them are now dead. Yampy is grateful to our friend Arthur Hale.. ..while studying the rest of the article carefully enough to repeat chunks of it more or less verbatim! In fact we spent quite some time on research for the piece and have made later revisions on a number of occasions as new information has emerged; the question of whether the Bodenham brother was Jack or Joe is just one example. Ironically, if the reporter had bothered to ask either the Clarke family or ourselves we could have named almost all of the characters on the photo (still stuck on the two girls!), rather than the few names they pinched from our article, which was last updated some time ago. A word of praise though for the Dudley News, whose Chief Reporter Heather Loat, according to Barry Clarke, spent thirty or forty minutes in conversation with Maud a few days ago on the subject of her centenary, rather than take the easy way out by rehashing the Express and Star story. As the Express and Star seems to think that there is nothing wrong in printing a stolen story without crediting the source, and then denying that they had done so, we presume that we are entitled to take whatever we want from their newspaper on a similar basis. However, as far as we are concerned that's not journalism. When Maud's 100th birthday appeared in the Express and Star we didn't scan their photo in and pinch their story. Instead we got in touch with the Clarke family, obtained a different picture from them, and arranged to interview Maud at a later time so that we can delve deeper into her fascinating life. What do Yampy readers think of the Express and Star's actions? Have we been hard done by - or are we being over-sensitive? Email us at admin@yampy.co.uk.

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