News You Can Use -- Again and Again

Apparently some news is too good to break just once. New Times couldn't help noticing Associated Press article about the five sex offenders living under the Julia Tuttle Causeway that appeared in Saturday's Herald and Sunday's New York Times.

Because we wrote it a month ago.

In our March 8 article "Swept Under the Bridge," New Times broke the news that three recently released sex offenders were being placed under a bridge outside the courthouse, where they were checked upon daily by probation officers. New Times also revealed that the location, across the street from a rape crisis center, was illegal. A week later, we reported that one of the three offenders had since been arrested; the other two were moved to the Julia Tuttle Causeway, where other sex offenders were already living.

On April 7, South Florida's Local 10 picked up the story. They were kind enough to mention that New Times had broken it; CNN, was less courteous. Then the AP wire picked it up — again without crediting New Times.

Since then, the story has run amok, appearing in the New York Times, the Bismarck Tribune, Ireland Online, Taiwan's Taipei Times, and Beijing's Xinhua News Agency — to name a few.

But we don't mean to embarrass the authors of those articles (John Zarrella and Patrick Oppman of CNN, and John Pain of the AP). As someone once said (and who the hell cares who?), there's no such thing as bad publicity, right? --Isaiah Thompson