AP and newspapers use exclusive story from DarienPatch without attribution

Hartford Courant fires George Gombassy, 40 year veteran

From Connecticut Watchdog by George Gombassy and JIM CAMERON

The Courant and AP plagiarized a big story in today’s paper.

Darien independent candidate for First Selectman, Chris Noe, was found to have a police record for shooting a guy in the neck and being a peeping tom. 

The two weeklies in town missed the story completely. But start-up www.darien.patch.com run by one-woman journalism-dynamo Cecelia Smith, fresh out of NYU, did the digging and made the story. She even used the Darien Times’ own archives (Police Blotter) and trekked to New London to review Stonington PD microfilms of the case… and dug up the witnesses.

She broke the story Thursday night.

The Darien Times rewrote her story on Saturday but gave her no credit.

Stamford Advocate did the same: no attribution. And Sunday’s Courant (quoting the AP) was even more vague as to the source of the news.

This gal scored a major scoop, yet print rivals won’t give her any credit. Shame on them.