ACCORDING TO A NEW YORK TIMES’ article headed New York Attorney General to Investigate Firm That Sells Fake Followers 1, The New York attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, on Saturday opened an investigation into a company that sold millions of fake followers on social media platforms, some of them copying real users’ personal information.
YEARS AGO, c 1966, I was a newspaper printer, specifically a “stoneman” or “makeup” (not “make out”) man. Gannett bought the Cocoa Tribune newspaper and created the first TODAY newspaper to compete with the Orlando Sentinel-Star and, to a lesser degree, the Miami Herald (that had less area circulation that the Sentinel-Star). I was raised in south Florida and, after military service, worked at the Sentinel-Star.
One of my jobs was to make up TODAY’s editorial pages, both the editorials and the Letters to the Editor.
During the early, pre-first edition days, the Editorial Page editor would practice some “creative writing” to provide copy for the pages, just to see how the printed page would look. That’s pretty much Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for most publications.
The editor, to provide a “real” feeling, went through the local telephone book and “borrowed” names for – again – the dummy (not for publication) letters.
So far so good.
Then came time for The First Edition. Believe me, first editions are BIG DEALS for anyone who is part of the process. I was.
Unfortunately for the Editorial Page editor, and unbeknownst to the editorial page stoneman (this scrivener), the editor still was practicing his “creative writing” and still signing the letters with names garnered from the local phone book.
Gannett, in order to gain immediate circulation numbers, saturated Brevard County (in which Cocoa, Cape Canaveral, Merritt Island, Mims, and Titusville, are located) with free newspapers for two weeks. Every address in Brevard County got a copy of TODAY.
Two pages most people read after scanning Page 1: the comics and the editorial.
Pretty soon the publisher, Al Neuharth, was inundated with irate callers and letter writers, complaining that THEY did not write the letters attributed to them.
TODAY soon had a new Editorial Page editor.
Al Neuharth moved on to head up all Gannett operations.
This scrivener eventually moved from the backshop to editorial, back in the day when newspapers were trusted sources of information.
As King Solomon allegedly opined: There is nothing new under the sun.
Sources
1. NYT: http://tinyurl.com/y8brduge
PLAGIARISM is the act of appropriating the literary composition of another, or parts or passages of his writings, or the ideas or language of the same, and passing them off as the product of one’s own mind.
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