By David Simister, reporter
SOMETIMES being tarred with the "in the media" brush sucks. I came to the North Wales Weekly News with noble ambitions to do the best I can in covering people's stories, and I think everyone here does their upmost to make sure our reporting's fair, honest and reflective of the community.
Yet we still get groups of people who think that - being from the nasty, evil world of newspaper reporting - we're involved in some huge conspiracy to make them look as stupid as possible.
This is one of the lessons I've learned delving into the dark and murky world of urban exploration, an historically-minded hobby that borders on the barely legal. Essentially it involves daring photographers breaking into decaying buildings, taking snapshots of what remains, and then posting them online for preservation's sake.
Is it anti-social and illegal, or a necessary way of recording the neglected history across North Wales? That's what I was hoping to find out for a future edition of our feature series The Issue, but that's before I came across some of the hobby's more paranoid purveyors.
"There aren't any myths surrounding it, only what the press makes up," came the flatfooted refusal from 28 Days Later, one of the UK's biggest urban exploration forums after I made a polite enquiry. "So sorry, but the answer is NO."
Really? I thought if anything it'd be a lack of communication that helps perpetuate so many of the myths surrounding urban exploration in the first place. Obviously, by the very nature of it I can understand why so many urban explorers don't want to be identified, but that doesn't mean that the work they do can't be shared with the community and explained in greater detail.
The region's urban explorers remain shrouded in mystery for now, but they shouldn't be.
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