Within hours of The Lincoln County News going to press last week, we were notified we had printed a bogus birth announcement.
The announcement appears on Page 16A of our June 2 edition. As it turns out, the backstory, familiar to the principles involved, elevates this incident from a harmless, if annoying prank, to a case of sadistic harassment.
The story is out there, spread through Facebook connections. For the sake of the wronged, we will not recount those details here.
As it turns out, again via Facebook, there is an allegation of a second birth announcement printed two weeks earlier, which was also bogus and also, allegedly, submitted by the same individual or individuals.
At this point, we don’t know for a provable certainty what is true and what isn’t. There is a lot of he said-she said type information being thrown around but we are loath to print such things.
As much as this is an issue for law enforcement we have turned over the materials and information we have and we will continue to assist the investigation in any way possible.
Regardless of whatever private, personal issues led to this situation, for LCN the issue is the false information. We may have acted in good faith, but the fact is the information submitted was false, which did harm to us and a disservice to you.
Both birth announcements in question were submitted via our website. We have since discontinued the link, but when it was operable, users could access a form, fill in the appropriate information, including an email address, and send it in.
Often as not, if there was no issue, the submission was edited for style and content and moved forward for press. In both cases at issue, these seemed to be straight up birth announcements and we moved them forward.
In light of this recent situation, we have discontinued the practice of accepting birth announcements via our web page. From this point on, unless it’s a formal submission sent to us by a familiar hospital, every birth announcement must come with a human attached, preferably one reachable by phone. We will happily take it by email, snail mail, or hand delivered, but at minimum we need to be able to, and will, verify there is an actual person at the other end sending this material to us.
