LUTHMANN NOTE: I’m sick and tired of independent reporters being treated like unpaid research assistants for newspapers that consider themselves our betters. Larry published September 9. The Hartford Courant followed September 11. If his reporting helped their newsroom find or develop this story, credit him. If it didn’t, explain the reporting trail. That is a fair question, and a newspaper should know how to answer one. Meanwhile, Goff’s $350,000 request deserves scrutiny on its evidence, just as Reinken’s defense does. Nobody wins because they bought billboards, hired lawyers or own a masthead. Show the documents and explain what they establish. Readers deserve that much. This piece is “CT Dykes Gone Wild,” first available on The Family Court Circus.
The Hartford Courant can find room for Brooke Goff’s lawsuit. Can it find room for the reporter who got there first?
Larry Noodles published his report about Goff’s altered-photo case on September 9. His page includes the court paperwork and reader comments dated September 10. The Courant’s coverage carries a September 11 date. Whatever the newspaper’s explanation, Larry’s earlier publication belongs in the public record.
I want the Courant to answer a straightforward question: Did its reporter or editors use Larry’s story to discover, develop or verify their own? If they did, credit him. A link and a sentence are hardly a crushing burden for a newspaper.
Independent reporters spend time digging through filings, chasing leads and publishing stories without a large newsroom behind them. Their work does not become anonymous raw material because somebody with a bigger masthead decides the subject is worth covering. If a newspaper benefits from that work, readers deserve to know whose reporting helped get it there.
The chronology alone doesn’t prove copying. But it gives the Courant a concrete question to answer, and the answer should concern its reporting process, not Larry’s tone or whether editors approve of his website. My reporting on the Davis Vanguard’s handling of Susan Bassi’s articles applies the same principle: journalists who demand accountability owe it themselves.
Here, Larry gets his name, his link and his place in the chronology.
A $350,000 request, an office group chat and competing arguments over reputational harm put Connecticut lawyers on opposite sides of a bitter dispute.
Condensed account of Larry Noodles’s September 9 report, with subsequent coverage noted below. Go to his blog for THE FULL SHMECKLE.
Brooke Goff’s dispute with her former law firm has moved from an office group chat into court. Larry Noodles reported September 9 that Goff sued Eric Reinken, Danielle Diberardini-Albrecht and Frank Zachmar over an altered photograph and accompanying messages.
According to the allegations described in the reporting, the image depicted Goff holding male genitalia or a phallic object. Goff says the communications humiliated her and falsely portrayed aspects of her personal life. Noodles’s article links the court papers and identifies a request for a $350,000 prejudgment attachment.
Noodles takes a skeptical view of Goff’s damages demand and argues that the image should be treated as protected parody. Those are his arguments, rather than findings resolving the case. His report also disputes the description of Zachmar as an attorney, identifying him as a paralegal.
CT Insider’s September 11 report describes Goff’s allegations of defamation and emotional harm, along with an apology she attributes to Reinken. It also reports his position that the case lacks merit. The requested $350,000 is not an award.
Read Larry Noodles’s original article and its linked exhibits.
