October 2008 Archives
Fishy business!
Posted by North Wales Weekly News team on October 9, 2008 2:28 PM
By David Simister, reporter
I KNEW there was something fishy going on with the e-mails I got earlier this week, but its anonymous writer reckoned he'd got us hook, line and sinker.
We seem to get millions of e-mails every week and yes, they have proven to be a revolution when it comes to chasing stories. The only problem is that I only tend to take an interest in ones about news stories in North Wales; the 24th anniversary of Britain's third best-selling brand of jam I don't.
This week's one was an absolute gem. An Abergele fisherman had caught a record-breaking 18lb brown trout in one of the region's fisheries, and an e-mail purporting to be from the fishery's owner offered me the chance to net some nifty coverage in this week's Weekly News. Only one problem: it wasn't true.
I don't know who the hoaxer was - funnily, he chose to remain completely anonymous - but he clearly reckoned we're too lazy to check our stories before running them. A quick call to the fishery's owners confirmed no records had been broken, the e-mail had nothing to do with them, and the picture "they" had promised to send was a internet-copied fake.
Oddly, the next e-mail from our hoaxing friend implied he'd had us "hook, line and sinker". Perhaps if we'd run a spoof story on our pages, he would have done. Yet all he's achieved is wasting a lot of people's time and falsely assuming a hardworking Abergele businessman's identity (although it was quite funny).
As Malcolm Muggeridge once said, only dead fish swim with the stream.
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This page contains an archive of all entries posted to Working Week in the October 2008. They are listed from oldest to newest.
September 2008 is the previous archive.November 2008 is the next archive.
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