Mr. Hernandez,

I read your interview with Mr. Farnham with great interest.

To provide some balance, the issue with Talk of the Sound was not simply that the editor of AOL Patch New Rochelle lifted content from my site without attribution. If it were, the matter could have been resolved quite simply by either removing the content or crediting me.

In point of fact AOL issued two OFFICIAL statements accusing me of lying and make various other defamatory remarks about me and my motivation for “lying” about the content in question. This went on for four days.

Neither the local editor or the regional editor (the source of the defamatory comments) ever contacted me and still have not to do this say (the local editor was fired; the regional editor is still there).

Four days after I made AOL Patch aware of the problem, Brian Farnham called me and admitted that the material had been lifted from my site.

I appreciated his calling and his admitting to me that they had plagiarized my content. He sent me an email apologizing and invited me to publish it on my site.

AOL Patch never published any sort of editor’s note, correction, or made attribution or made any other effort to acknowledge on their own site that they had (a) plagiarized; (b) lied about it repeatedly; (c) made accusatory, defamatory remarks about me in attempt to “discredit” my claims nor have they have ever retracted the defamatory claims or apologized for them.

I would prefer to consider the matter closed but if anyone at AOL Patch is going to try and pass the incident off as a matter of merely lifting an image from my site then I am going to respond.

I am sorry to see that comments were disabled on your article as I would have liked to have had the opportunity to weigh in on Mr. Farnham’s remarks regarding their Talk of the Sound incident.

There is also a second issue I discussed with Mr. Farnham which was the attempt to co-opt the site by the local Democratic Party establishment; from what I can see he had made good on his promise to make sure the site was not controlled by any local political machine.

Sincerely,

Robert Cox
Managing Editor
New Rochelle’s Talk of the Sound
http://www.newrochelletalk.com