As regular readers will know, I blog about this, that and Coronation Street. Way back in 1995 I started writing Coronation Street Weekly Updates for a fan group online. Word of the updates spread and at its peak, there were 6,000 email subscribers to the updates until the email server collapsed under the strain of the weight and the group moved to the more stable platform of Yahoogroups. The updates featured on all of the Coronation Street fan sites and garnered some great praise over the years. They even have their own website.Fast forward 10 years to 2005 when commercial blogging company Shiny Media launched Corrieblog. Ashley Norris, one of their three Directors at the time, asked me to be editor of this new Coronation Street blog, based on the witty, weekly Corrie updates I’d been writing for 10 years.
I edited and wrote for Shiny Media's Corrieblog for two years, all the time continuing to write my Coronation Street Weekly Updates for Corrie fan sites and the email subscription list too. I asked Shiny Media if I could bring the Coronation Street Weekly Updates to Corrieblog and they agreed. I posted the weekly update as an extra blog post in addition to the 5 blog posts a day I was paid to write.
In 2007 after two years with Corrieblog, I gave it all up. Before I left, I brought in a new writer who is still editing the site. But while I have left Corrieblog behind me, the new editor carries on writing with much the same style, tone and ideas as I always did. Flattering? Possibly.
What irks is that my Coronation Street Weekly Updates remain a part of Corrieblog long after I left blogging for cash far behind me. They’re now called Coronation Street Weekly Reviews but are written in much the same style and tone as my own. Despite repeated requests to the editor and to Shiny Media that a weekly post in this format no longer be included on a commercial site, my requests have been ignored.
When I handed over editing Corrieblog to the new person, I gave her as much help as I could over a period of weeks as she found her blogging feet, handing over pages of contacts and sources for stories, passing on emails from PRs companies and even media companies looking for a Corrie fan to interview.
However, another request last week to reconsider using the Coronation Street Weekly Updates on Corrieblog has gone unacknowledged again by both its editor and by the one remaining director of Shiny Media, Chris Price.
You're probably reading this thinking that I'm being too sensitive and over protective of these Corrie weekly updates... but after 14 years of writing them and developing the fan community around them, wouldn't you be the same?
10 comments:
I think you're spot on and your feelings of irksomeness are justified. I just wish I could give you some advice on how to resolve the issue satisfactorily.
Yes I would feel the same.
I do feel the same.
I know it's not the same situation but a woman I know, takes stuff from my blog and uses it on hers, little expressions I made up.
The words I use to refer to my family etc.
Not in the same league as you I know but still, my words, my style.
I hope you can resolve this and you are definitely within your rights to feel damn pi$$ed off about things.
Yes I would get mad too.
It's like when colleagues pinched my teaching materials and presented them as their own to gain promotion.
But don't get bitter. :)
Good on you, Nora. It's a shame that it has got to this stage, but I hope you get it acknowledged/resolved soon.
Thanks all for your support. I'm certain that it won't be acknowledged or resolved but just putting it in the public domain and giving myself a voice somewhere about it has been rather cathartic!
Not content with writing like you, she's now writing AS you.
Exactly. I think it's rather sad and a little scary too.
Hope this was all resolved. Sounds a bit of a sorry state of affairs all round really. There is only one Flaming Nora xx
Thanks for your support Linda. Shiny Media haven't responded so i can only assume they approve of their bloggers and editors of blogs nicking, copying and pasting other people's work and then paying and rewarding them for doing so. Sheesh.
She's gone and left now. After weeks of very little in the way of posting (a far cry from the heady days of minimum five posts per weekday), comes this.
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