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Memo to Kevin Coughlin – google “Streisand effect”

Wed, Apr 15, 2009

Politics

Gawker makes my day.

James Renner, a reporter for the alt-weekly Cleveland Scene, got fired, apparently for sass-talking the paper’s owner after the owner decided to spike a story about an affair-having state senator. Now the writer says he’s going to file a wrongful termination suit, and, more importantly, he sent the entire spiked story to a blog, which published the whole thing. Streisand effect!

What’s that you say?  

The Streisand effect is an Internet phenomenon where an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information backfires, causing the information to be widely publicized. 

Snap!

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6 Comments For This Post

  1. Eric Says:
    April 15th, 2009 at 3:01 pm

    [snickers]

  2. Jeff Hess Says:
    April 15th, 2009 at 4:13 pm

    Shalom Tim,

    My question is:

    What is the over under on when Susan Goldberg pulls a Doug “I’ve Got A Secret” Clifton and runs the Coughlin story?

    B’shalom,

    Jeff

  3. anonymouse Says:
    April 15th, 2009 at 4:17 pm

    Has anyone taken into account that the Lynett/Haggerty families of Scranton PA (the families who own the paper) seem to ardently support Democrats? and have a history of giving political contributions to Democratic candidates? How does that fit into the “they are out to protect Republicans” conspiracy theory?

    http://www.opensecrets.org/indivs/search.php?name=lynett&state=PA&zip=&employ=&cand=&c2008=Y&all=Y&sort=N&capcode=tcyfx&submit=Submit

    http://www.opensecrets.org/indivs/search.php?name=haggerty&state=PA&zip=&employ=&cand=&all=Y&sort=N&capcode=bhw2j&submit=Submit

  4. bonobo Says:
    April 15th, 2009 at 4:57 pm

    The “they are out to protect Republicans” ‘conspiracy theory’ theory that anonymouse mentions appears to consist of one statement:

    As Scene has had a long history of publishing similar stories, I believe this story was spiked solely because Coughlin threatened to sue. I was told we “cannot afford a lawsuit right now”.

    I certainly hope it is not because Coughlin is a Republican, because we recently published cover stories on democrats including Marc Dann and Bill Mason, which were just as hard-hitting.

    So, Anonymouse is correct, the donation trail pretty much kills the theory that nobody was espousing.

  5. bonobo Says:
    April 15th, 2009 at 4:58 pm

    The above comment was supposed to have a formatted blockquote. The middle two grafs above are from the original post:

    http://bloggerinterrupted.com/2009/04/kevin-coughlin-threatens-suit-on-scene-magazine-over-sex-story-scene-fires-reporter

  6. Mindy Blunkin Says:
    April 15th, 2009 at 6:44 pm

    Guys, a tabloid refused to print a tabloid story. That kind of means it was a bullshit story. I doubt Coughlin even looked at this twice.

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