The WORD Blog

The Report of Its Death Greatly Exaggerated?

Tom Orr, General Manager of Uwire, wrote this:

Date: Wed Oct 28 19:40:35 EDT 2009
From: Tom Orr
Subject: Your entry “UWIRE.com Dead”
To: gmorris@hunter.cuny.edu

Mr. Morris,
A link to your blog entry “UWIRE.com dead” was just forwarded to me. There are a number of significant factual errors contained in that entry.

Below is our statement on the current status of UWIRE.

UWIRE has temporarily suspended its print wire operations. The company is in the process of trying to get the wire relaunched as quickly as possible and when more information is available it will be made public.

We are sorry for the service disruption and for any inconvenience this has caused our members and partners.

—
Tom Orr
General Manager, UWIRE
tom@uwire.com
1275 Kinnear Road, Suite 132
Columbus, OH 43212

I replied:

Hi,
I don’t mind publishing your statement. But I don’t see a number of significant factual errors. If you want to cite them, I would certainly consider printing some kind of clarification. Certainly, the students whom I’ve been pitching Uwire to – the ones who alerted me that it was
inaccessible – will be pleased to know there are plans to revive it.
Best,

Gregg Morris
Hunter College

And then I subsequently found the following in an updated Google check. It was dated October 19; I had stopped checking Google around mid October, had stopped emailing anyone I believed might have information and then stumbled on a letter from the lawyers of the original owner and that letter and subsequent phone conversations with a legal mind were the source of my pithy “UWIRE.com Dead“):

UWIRE, student media’s AP, out of service (-spectatorblog of su-spectator.com):

UWIRE, a syndication service for student newspapers, has temporarily suspended its print wire operations, according to its general manager.

The service’s Web site, uwire.com, stopped updating its headlines and sending out its daily news digest e-mails last week and now a visit to the site returns an error. (Click here for an Internet archive of uwire.com on April 30, 2008.)

“UWIRE has temporarily suspended its print wire operations,” Tom Orr, UWIRE’s general manager, wrote in an e-mail to The Spectator. “The company is in the process of trying to get the wire relaunched as quickly as possible and when more information is available it will be made public.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 9:00 am and is filed under Journalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.