(Charlie) Bird on a Wire
Or not, as it happens.
RTE’s America correspondent-elect, Charlie Bird, has a blog on the RTE site, which was being pimped on Morning Ireland this am.
So naturally, I signed up.
But lo, it seems it’s ghost-written. The Bird is on the wing. too busy to blog, but has the time to take the credit for someone else’s work. (No, not Robert Shortt)
Behold the grab from my google reader, which shows the post written by ‘hennesm’:
Sure enough, if you’re sad enough to dig into the code – here’s the evidence:
Posted at <a href="http://www.rte.ie/ie/charliebirdsblog/entry/monday_afternoon_chicago">09:47PM Nov 03, 2008</a> <!--by Mark Hennessy in <span class="category">General</span> | -->
Same for the other entries, too.
Charlie Bird: Never the same after the battle of O’Connell St.
Update: Seems hennesm is also updating Mark Little’s blog, Race to Washington. Could be that both Little & Bird are zapping their ‘blog posts’ back to a webmaster?
No other RSS posts are tagged with the same byline, though. Weird…
Maman Poulet already highlighted the fact that the RTE blogs don’t do comments – perhaps this is why?
4 comments
[...] Markham Nolan (feck’s sake stop being linked to) asks are the RTE blogs being ghostwritten? [...]
There are other possibilities than ghost writing…
1) CSS not updated, which means the wrong credit is given in the internal data (copy and paste error if you will)
2) Login in and transcribe. It’s possible that Mr Hennessy is transcribing phoned in content from the reporters, and his authorship is being detected/reported
3) Shared login. Silly, but possible from a remote site. Also possible if user is assumed and has to be manually changed if Little/Bird type in.
4) Locked out of their accounts (well it is an exciting time for a reporter.)
@Will – good points. I’d thought of, 3, but probably failed to articulate it because the thought of RTE journos sharing a login conjures up images of the pair of them taking turns on an old IBM laptop on a dialup line from the dark ages – I wish for better for Irish journos, I guess.
Little’s blog does at least sound like him. Bird’s blog is sufficiently barren for it to be believable that he’s doing it (sic) himself.
IF I was going to guess, I’d put my money on a twist to reason number 2 and say that the journalists are emailing their copy to the person who has access to the ‘hennesm’ account.
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