Bob Trane suing The Somerville Journal

[nvidia99999.livejournal.com]

A friend e-mailed me this. It seems rather odd and childish. Bob Trane is suing the Somerville Journal over a cartoon? In my opinion, it does not send a good message about Trane, frankly. Comments?

Bob Trane suing The Somerville Journal

Comments

[jamiesquared.livejournal.com]

Well they also didnt run his full page ad that he prepaid for...thats a legal issue right there.

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

I'm certainly curious to hear more. That piece is just a press release and given the other material Trane's campaign has put out over the past month, I'm not inclined to go on blind faith here. I'd like to hear what the Journal has to say about it, too.

[ron_newman]

Here's the Journal's story.

Suing over a cartoon is ridiculous, but he does have a legitimate complaint that the Journal failed to run his ad in the last issue before the election. That kind of egregious mistake can't really be repaired. I do not understand how this can occur:

Journal advertising Director Cris Warren explained the ad running in the wrong paper last week was a booking mistake on part of her department in Needham and had nothing to do with the editorial department in Somerville. Her department intends to refund the Trane campaign for the one ad that was not published in Somerville.

“This political advertisement was inadvertently published in the Cambridge Chronicle instead of the Somerville Journal. The Community Newspaper Advertising Department regrets and apologizes to all involved for this unfortunate error,” Warren said.

(No part of Cambridge is in the district.)

Hmmm. But assuming that the SJ

[nvidia99999.livejournal.com]

did it on purpose is a bit paranoid. If they paid for a service that was not delivered then they should negotiate on getting back part of their money, not sue.

[georgy.livejournal.com]

Not that I disagree on it being a huge error, but Gatehouse Media is going through such upheaval that I am not surprised some things are falling through the cracks. And also, things like this do happen at newspapers from time to time, upheaval or no. Not that that is any consolation to Trane, nor should it be, but these things do happen. I sincerely doubt the Journal/Gatehouse did anything purposefully, as it would surely backfire in their face if they did.

[ron_newman]

I'm sure that Gatehouse didn't do this on purpose, but still, I expect better from my long-established local newspaper. This wasn't a little 6-inch, 2-column ad, this was a full-pager, a hard thing to lose track of.

[thetathx1138.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but we only have Trane's story on that. It could be as direct as the S'Ville Journal trying to throw him off or as simple as a goofup somewhere in the chain of command.

[cos]

It might even be that he paid for three issues and they ran it for three issues and that was it, or it might've been a miscommunication about which specific issues it was supposed to run in. Either Trane or the Journal might've goofed up, or both. Or Trane's press release might be misleading (based on what we've seen from him in the recent past, a real possibility).

Remember when Joe Lieberman accused the Ned Lamont campaign of taking down his web site on election day, and it turned out the Lieberman campaign was using very cheap web hosting that simply couldn't handle the election day volume? Sometimes when a campaign goofs up, they accuse first and noticed what they've done a little later. Let's wait a bit and see what this one turns out to be.

[thetathx1138.livejournal.com]

I'm actually guessing this was a production mistake.

I have to admit though, Trane being so tetchy over a cartoon does raise an eyebrow. Maybe he doesn't like his chances?

It looks like he has no sense of humor

[nvidia99999.livejournal.com]

It looks like he is an unreasonably litigious person and a person with some temper problem. That's the way it looks.