For anybody wanting to be informed about the underbelly of WNY politics, reading Joe Illuzzi is a must. He often gets political "news" before anybody else prints it . . . & other times he is dead wrong.

Periodically he sounds like a raving lunatic, sometimes sounding as if he had imbibed a bit much . . . as in this new post.

Illuzzi has long presented himself as chief competitor to the Bflo News, as he has increasingly lifted content from the Bflo News with little indication of its source, especially not revealing writers.

So the Bflo news responded . . .

Watch for more.

http://politicsny.net/

July 10, 2008

PoliticsNY.Net: BUFFALO NEWS

IF YOU'RE AFRAID - JUST SAY YOU'RE AFRAID

"Dear Mr. Illuzzi: At 12:37pm, 7/7/08 a story entitled “Louis J. Thomas expected to join Erie County control board” appeared on The Buffalo News website. That very same story, repeated virtually word for word, appears on the website PoliticsNY.net.


As you should well know, the material produced by Buffalo News employees and published either in its newspaper or on its website is copyrighted material and may not be used or republished in any manner without the express permission of The Buffalo News. To reiterate this point, at the bottom of The Buffalo News web page on which the story first appeared, is a clear warning: That very same story, repeated virtually word for word, appears on the website PoliticsNY.net. The infringing material on your website is as follows:

“Louis J. Thomas, known for his long service to the United Steelworkers of America, is in line to become the seventh director on Erie County’s state-appointed control board. Control board insiders say the Democratic-controlled State Assembly has chosen Thomas to fill the chair once occupied by Sheila Kee. Kee resigned in June 2007 when Spitzer appointed her as the top state Health Department official in Western New York. “

(READERS THAT IS IT CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? THIS IS ALMOST AS BAD AS WHEN THE NEWS PUBLISHED THAT LIBELOUS SUNDAY FRONT PAGE STORY A FEW YEARS AGO. MY PHOTO WAS LARGER THAN WHAT IS RESERVED FOR HEADS OF STATE)

“© 2008 The Buffalo News. The information you received online from The Buffalo News is protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The copyright laws prohibit any copying, redistribution, re-transmitting, or re-purposing of any copyright-protected material.”

The unauthorized material currently appearing on your website must be removed immediately. Furthermore, you must cease and desist from any future violations of Buffalo News copyrighted material. Very truly, Lawrence R. Bayerl General Counsel The Buffalo News ###


'SIR: The Buffalo News infringes on my material almost every single day!!!

At least I am not a hypocrite.

Besides that there is NO such thing as copy-write material on the Internet when you invite readers to pass the story along via email etc.

Tell Stan (Lipsey Publisher) & Margaret (Sullivan Editor) to make me an offer!

But then where would they get their breaking News?' Respectfully Joe Illuzzi (scroll down) ###

PoliticsNY.NET: 73.2 Gbs of Bandwidth in June, 2,900,000 Hits, 216,000 page views, 7,200 unique visitors (hosts) - 9173 unknown hosts, tens of thousands of visitors each month. We do not count consecutive visits. I guarantee you the News et al., count consecutive visits; count every click to a new page as a visit or unique visit & new page view. This is how they cheat their advertisers!!!
The News misrepresents real traffic to the sites in question.

TV & radio sites do the same exact thing!!!

Our top ten hosts are the US Congress, NY State Legislature, NYS Court System, Erie County, a number of syndicates & providers like Time Warner, Verizon, Lexis Nexis, NEWSTEX ( I get a royalty check from Newstex almost every month!, et al. Just as an example of the quality of our captured readership day in day out. Not to mention our SUBSCRIBER based email updates which are not counted in our numbers. No one can tell me why? We send maybe three blasts a day, depending on what kind of news day it is. This represents close to 3,000 addresses that are not counted; albeit circa 1,000 unique addresses.

This, by the way, is for our "one page" format; if we had 100's of links like the News, et al. our numbers would increase exponentially. This is with a $120,000.00 plus budget & a full time staff of one, me. Two free lance writers!

The Buffalo News has a $250,000,000.00 plus budget with a staff in the hundreds.