The WORD Blog

Earlier Posts Flawed. Is the WORD Becoming a Rumormonger? Uh Oh!

From Uwire.com General Manager:

Gregg,
Some more information to clarify/correct your original entry.

• The company was sold at the end of last year, December 2008. Far from being “cloaked in secrecy” the deal was announced on the UWIRE.com site, and the new CEO granted interviews to two major college media blogs to discuss the purchase and the future of the company (http://www.collegemediainnovation.org/blog/2009/03/icm-interview-joe-weasel-of-palestranetuwire/ andhttp://collegemediamatters.com/2009/03/25/exclusive-palestranet-ceo-discusses-uwire-purchase/)
• I’m not sure which “UWIRE personalities” you tried to contact, but neither I nor any other 2009 UWIRE employees received any communication that I am aware of. Literally dozens of others from vendors to member outlets contacted us about the suspension of service and received an explanation of the situation.
• I’m not sure what ABC Online’s relationship to UWIRE is. I checked the contract we have on-hand for City College of New York, and it was signed when the company was owned by “The Main Quad.” Therefore, I’m not sure where you got ABC Online from. I can find no mention of ABC owning the company in the histories posted online, and other employees have said that they have never heard that ABC owned the company either.I can’t say for sure that ABC has never owned it, but I can tell you that the current owners did not purchase the company from ABC Online, and the company who owned it previously (CSTV/CBS College Sports) originally bought it themselves in 2004. It’s possible thatthey bought it from ABC, but even if that’s true, any attorney from ABC could not have been discussing any sale in the last five years with any sort of first-hand knowledge.
• A Google News search for UWIRE would have turned up as its first result an article written more than a week ago addressing the situation and including a statement from the company and details of the recent sale — essentially outlining every bullet point laid out above: http://blog.su-spectator.com/2009/10/uwire-student-medias-ap-out-of-service/

Hope that helps.
Tom

My response:

No excuse for writing about ABC when it should have been CBS. CBS was in notes but ABC made it to the page.

Information about sale – about a teaspoon if that much – came from legal staff at CBS College Sports.

Missed news in December 2008 info about sale. Googling “Uwire” with a variety of search words, such as “sold,” “dead,” “out of business” and others that don’t come to mind right now turned up nothing but Uwire URLs that were “dead.”

Stopped googling near end of first week of October.

There are two UWIRE contact emails in address book. One is dead; the other, “Tom Orr <tom@uwire.com>” was somehow overlooked. Emails were sent to any “UWIRE” bylines found in google or facebook. Absolutely no replies.

Cryptic discussion/information from/with legal staff – plus lack of replies from the googled/facebook-ed UWIRE bylines sent emails – aroused suspicions that should have been better sourced.

So, when does news operation resume?

Tags: ABC, CBS College Sports, corrections, UWIRE, WORD

This entry was posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 8:00 am and is filed under Journalism, Journalism Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.