Coupeville Sports

Oh, Canada…

Apparently when the Whidbey Examiner sold itself to the Evil Empire (AKA Sound Publishing, AKA Black Press) they sold more than their soul and a 15-year legacy as Whidbey Island’s last independent newspaper. They also sold the ability to have a functioning web site.

From the day the Canucks swept in and updated the Examiner’s website (AKA made it look exactly like the Whidbey News-Times), nothing has worked the way it should.

I wrote hundreds of stories in the past three years for the Examiner and most of those stories don’t exist anymore. Broken links litter the site like flotsam and jetsam on the beach after high tide, and good luck trying to use their website to find out what Bessie Walstad or Tyler King did last year.

But then, either through negligence, error or blatant attempt to rewrite history and scrub the decks, something went really wrong on Aug. 30, 2012. Because from that point on, many, many stories written by people such as myself and others (including political endorsement stories obviously written by editor/publisher Kasia Pierzga) suddenly started bearing the byline of Vincent Nattress, an innocent freelancer who now, apparently, is owed quite a lot of money for quite a number of stories he supposedly wrote.

So, the time and effort I put in to help keep the Examiner propped up — while being paid virtually nothing — so that it would be worth something when it was eventually sold out from underneath our feet, is now also being erased.

It’s not like I expect to suddenly be retroactively paid for the countless articles I wrote on my own time. I knew what the gig paid (it kept me in gas and bananas) and chose to write a lot of stories pro bono.

I’m a big boy. I chose to go along. No problemo.

BUT, I would like to see my name remain on the stories I wrote. And, I wouldn’t mind an explanation for why someone else is now credited for my stories.

Is that too much to ask?

Apparently, as we head into Day Two of radio silence from my former newspaper home.