Ham It Up

Neither did a lot of other information-providers across the country, but that didn't stop them from running with it -- a point correctly stressed by Bill Shine, Fox News's senior vice president of programming. On his April 24 broadcast, CNN's Lou Dobbs accused Levesque of being out of his "cotton-pickin' mind" because of the way he'd dealt with the ham-sandwich story. Dobbs blasted the superintendent on April 25 and 27, too, but switched his reference from a sandwich to a "hambone" -- an extremely weak ploy to avoid admitting he'd been suckered. Likewise, other websites continued to feature the satire-spiced version days afterward, including FreeRepublic.com, which posted it with a double byline crediting Plagman and a Sun Journal scribe. By the time the piece and its accompanying thread were removed, Meyer notes, it had already collected 400-plus comments.

Associated Content is also instituting changes -- like, for instance, banishing Plagman from the site for violating its independent-contractor license agreement. Plagman thinks this is unfair, especially since AC sent him an e-mail urging him to make more news submissions after he sent an embellished report about two bank-robbing Georgia teens dubbed the "Barbie Bandits." Nevertheless, Craig Abruzzo, Associated Content's general counsel, defends the decision. "We do not encourage or permit writers to submit content with false quotes into the news section," he writes via e-mail. "Our rules at AC are pretty simple, but we take them very seriously."

As evidence of AC's sincerity, Abruzzo mentions the hiring of Tim Skillern as the site's news director. Skillern, who begins his new job on May 14, has been working in the Rocky's multimedia department since 2000, and was deeply involved in projects such as "The Crossing," a 33-part series for which he wrote, reported and edited nineteen separate video segments that accompanied it online.

"Falling ad revenues and the current transitional period for newspapers had no bearing on my decision to leave the Rocky," Skillern maintains in an e-mail. Rather, he's excited about the opportunity to oversee "local and vertical news teams across the country. The hope is that a large amount of AC's news content arrives unsolicited.... But when news breaks, we'll target producers who live where the news breaks and hopefully get content from them."

That's precisely what happened in the case of the recent shootings at Virginia Tech. Content producers create profiles loaded with personal information, and when word of the massacre reached them, AC personnel found that 51 people had Virginia Tech connections. "So we messaged those content producers and said, 'Get out there,'" Beatty recalls. "And within an hour, we had thirteen of those 51 people working on content."

With an ever-growing roster of producers and an audience to match (approximately 4 million unique visitors drop by each month), Associated Content is getting more challenging to manage with each passing day. Beatty, a former teacher who never planned to become a computer-age entrepreneur, doesn't use these factors as an excuse for the Plagman problem. "We feel terrible about it, and we apologize for any sort of misunderstanding," he says. But he prefers to focus on the positive side of his creation, whose success he attributes to users, not himself. In his opinion, "That's the power of a people's media company."

No one can accuse him of being a ham.