Coupeville Sports

“This is … wedgie season!!”

Ten months. 1,100 articles. 714,212 photos. A billion exclamation points!!!!!

Well, the first two are true at least. I’m not 100% sure on the second pair, but they feel close and I have no desire to wade through 1,100 articles to count them, so we’ll call it close enough.

August 16, 2012 was when coupevillesports.com launched, and, despite frequently offending the folks down South Whidbey way (oh, and the ones at ATM and in that blight known as Sultan), we’re still going. And by we, I mean me.

Except that’s not entirely true.

While I have written 99.2% of the words on this site, the lifeblood has been the photos, which have come from every direction, from one-timers and repeat offenders alike, and all for free, as we, the people of Coupeville (and sometimes Oak Harbor and, yes, South Whidbey) band together and tell Canada to stuff it.

Black Press may own all of the “real” newspapers on the Island, but, even as the Canadian Corporate Overlords foot the bills from their headquarters in a strip mall in Moose Jaw, they can’t disguise one fact.

We’re kickin’ their fannies.

This site, and others like http://www.islandpolitics.org/ beat the Canuck-enslaved Whidbey News-Times, Whidbey Examiner and South Whidbey Record EVERY … SINGLE … DAY.

We break more stories. We tell more stories. We publish more photos. They are becoming less and less relevant and we are not going away.

We are faster. We are more in tune with what is happening behind the scenes. We know this Island, this town, better than they do.

The wonder of it is, I’m doing this in my spare-time (when I’m not crushing my tender typing fingers in the dish pit at Christopher’s on Whidbey) and my output still vastly dwarfs what ALL their highly-paid reporters are producing as a group.

And they slip further and further behind, and, on occasion, they resort to stealing our stories and our photos, then run and hide when they get called on it.

It’s June 16, 2013, ten months into the revolution. And guess what? The pedal can still go further to the floor.

Let the bodies hit the floor. Let the tears flow in Moose Jaw as they realize their beans aren’t worth as much as they thought they were.

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Well, I still have this…

Then sell and move to Olympia.

Nope. Still pissed.

This coming Tuesday will mark the one-year anniversary since carpetbaggers sold The Whidbey Examiner to robber barons, and, in celebration, three years worth of my bylines vanished just like that.

We, the chronically underpaid, the ones who actually wrote the majority of the paper, the freelancers, were sold a vision of the Examiner as the last true independent paper on the Island.

We were fighting the good fight against the eee-vil Canadian Corporate encroachers from Black Press who already owned the Whidbey News-Times and South Whidbey Record.

We were the last line of defense, keepin’ it real for the 98239, telling the stories the other papers couldn’t, or wouldn’t. We were pure and untainted, journalistic warriors in a spiritual battle for the soul of the Island.

And the fact we often didn’t get paid for 98% of what we wrote? Sometimes the cause is great enough, you look the other way.

After all, we had our bylines — the proof that we, and not some faceless bean counters from Moose Jaw, had strung together those words. Our byline, that was our blood right.

Until it wasn’t anymore.

The owner of the Examiner left the Island not long after selling to the Canucks, and when the Moosejawians (not a word, but go with it) transformed the paper’s web site to look identical to the News-Times (conformity to the hive mind), poof!

First hundreds of my stories started showing up with a different byline on them. Then, after some mild complaining, the answer was simply to erase me from the Examiner’s history.

Fifteen years of freelance work, with hundreds of stories from 2009-2012, when I put in the most effort, gone.

Type my name into the Examiner web site today and you’ll find I wrote exactly one bylined story.

A year after the sale, the paper I believed in, the paper I worked my ass off for with little or no financial compensation, is dead.

They claim to still publish it, but it’s a ghost paper. It has no staff, and virtually all of its articles are the same ones that run in the News-Times, word for word, since they were written by News-Times staffers in the first place.

Stripped of its status as the Whidbey paper of record — with the publishing of legals moved back to the News-Times — it has no reason to exist.

But it lives on, in our memories.

You can twist and crush what we accomplished, but our work is still out there … even if you’ll never, ever, ever, EEEEEEEVVVERRRRR see it again cause that’s just not the Canadian way.

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And to think, THIS is the one of us that acted like a journalist today.

Journalists are supposed to be better than this.

In a world where people randomly “share/steal” things on Facebook, journalists don’t run photos that don’t belong to them, without asking permission first.

The Whidbey News-Times shamed itself today, and they are now trying to ignore what they did and hope no one noticed.

I did. I noticed. And I’m calling shenanigans.

And not the good kind.

Earlier today, an Island Transit bus plowed into En Vouge Hair Salon. Spencer Hawkins, who owns Gizmo’s Skateshop, snapped some photos of the damage.

Pretty soon the pictures were circulating around on Facebook, which is where I saw them.

I may have a blog now and not draw a pay check from a newspaper like I once did, but I still hold to some of my journalistic ethics.

I did not steal the photo. I asked Mr. Hawkins if I could use it, and, when he said yes, I gave him a photo credit.

Then I poked the News-Times over having something they didn’t.

Sure enough, 47 minutes later they got a short story up on-line, with the facts wrong and the EXACT SAME PHOTO I USED.

Not a similar shot from the same angle. The EXACT SAME PHOTO I USED.

But, no photo credit for Mr. Hawkins.

Then, people in the talkbacks (including myself) called them on their wrong facts and the photo with no credit. Bam! The photo later disappears.

No explanation. No apology. And no photo credit because THEY NEVER ASKED IF THEY COULD USE THE PHOTO.

You know, the way JOURNALISTS are supposed to operate. The way I operated today.

And how am I sure of this? Let me quote you the words of Spencer Hawkins, who shot the photo.

“The WNT never asked me to use the photos. I’m guessing that the paper just took the photo from someone else online.”

April 24, 2013. The day a once-proud paper resorted to stealing photos off the internet.

Journalism weeps.

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