Narrowboat World 'takes a liberty'

In his Victor Swift page earlier this week Tom Crossley of Narrowboat World poked fun at me and summarised me incorrectly as an overstayer.

I put my point of view in my own blog post, including pointing out that he'd missed the real story (about my boat licence being out of date, and the reason).

But I'm annoyed that he then nicked this little bit of the story to quietly update his own piece - but not acknowledging it or thanking me, nor giving any of the context.

Tom, I know you say you were a newspaper editor in your youth.  And that might have been the way you did things in the old days of hot metal, maybe half a century ago, when you could quietly update a story in a later edition and get away with a misrepresentation and claim a story as your own exclusive.

But the web is different. On the internet, quietly changing stories based on what someone else said, without acknowledging sources or disclosing corrections, is now considered plagiarism and dishonest journalism, and is poor editorial control.

And it's doubly dishonourable when your own update makes a mockery of a link someone else has already given to you.

When I change a story I almost always strikeout text to show deletions, and I add an Update: New facts are these...  (sort of thing) when I add something new to the post. 

But Narrowboat World itself never links out, and tries to make it hard for others to link in.  Its stories change quietly - and then just disappear.   And this makes it effectively a rumour-mill, and is why I don't trust it as a source of news about the waterways. 

Tom is a good sub-editor, but sub-editing doesn't make for good editing.  Trouble is, his 'columnists' are tarred by his brush.  As I've said before, they are effectively blogging anyway, mostly very well, albeit hamstrung by his poor website design. 

They could be doing it for themselves so easily and enhancing their reputations (and we'd all link to their individual stories quite often if they did).

If you want to add your views here, now, you don't need to 'write to the editor'.  Just add a comment below.  I don't vet them (but I'll amend them for you if you feel you misspoke), and you'll see your comments go public before I even read them myself.

Tom, if you want a nice photo of Granny Buttons, I'm happy to supply one - Ralph didn't do a very good job of the last one and as your reporter on the ground he got the facts wrong!

[Unlike Tom, I always try to acknowledge the source of the story.  So, thanks to Martin for alerting me to this via a comment on the previous post - he described it as 'a liberty'.  ]

Comments

[Lucy]

Thank you for common sense. Thank you for restoring my faith

[Nortonhillbilly]

I have always found that some of the NBW contributors act like the playground bullies; they pick on those they don't like, make snide remarks and believe themselves to be infallible. I find their site is hunmourleess disagrreable and often unpleasant. That isn't what boating should be about. Good for you in exposing this deceit

[James]

Having just looked at Narrowboat World, it looks like the offending comment has been removed.

[Bruce Napier]

Well said, that man. Even the dodgiest of tabloids allows you a right of reply, and will publish a correction when it's due.

[Mike]

NBW? Seems to be more opinionated than independent, and is always hard to navigate, read, and check for updates. I gave up on it as an information source ages ago.

It doesn't surprise me to hear that it suffers more "personal" deficiencies as well as the technical ones.