Last month I wrote a blogpost highlighting Time Out's tendency to lift research from dubious sources and then claim the information is 'official'. They did it again yesterday in a piece called "It’s official: 6 of the UK’s dirtiest beaches for water quality are near London", which it turned out was based on a press release from commercial website Holiday Park Guru. And last week they did it to me.
This time their post was called There is now a new cheaper and greener way to get to London Stansted Airport. This would be via coach company Flibco who are indeed new and their coaches are indeed green. So far so good. The piece was plainly lifted from what I'd written, and fair enough they'd credited me and linked through - no complaints there. My issue was this line which was wilfully false.
I never claimed Flibco was the cheapest, I merely presented all kinds of scenarios which showed it often was. Book well in advance and the Stansted Express is actually the cheapest, whereas Flibco never reduce their fares up front. But that wasn't the aspect which concerned me, it was their claim that what I'd said was somehow 'official'. Specifically it sounded like I'd said it was officially cheapest, which I hadn't, this was merely the Time Out journalist's false interpretation.
Some days I think Time Out staff are trained to exaggerate rather than tell the truth because this brings in the readers. Other times I like to imagine there's a shadowy character behind the scenes called The SubEditor whose job it is to shoehorn lies and gross simplifications into every article for clickbait purposes. Whichever, it's become a wholly unreliable platform as far as accuracy and attribution are concerned.
I did email the journalist in question to express my displeasure, politely, but have heard nothing back. I therefore hope that writing about it in on my blog will bring the matter to the attention of those who work there. I know Time Out read this blog because they appropriated another of my posts last month, again with due accreditation, the very day after I last slagged them off for overuse of the word officially.
What I write is not official, although if Time Out are happy to assume it is then I am happy to call them liars - official.
