The Daily Fishwrap wars rage on and on

The Eye won’t get blackened in this fight.

The Web sites of the Fort Collins Coloradoan and Greeley Tribune were lively cyber-places Feb. 22, first when the Coloradoan splashed up an account of how the Tribune would halt its unethical practice of lifting stories from competing daily newspapers and publishing them with Associated Press credit lines.

About an hour later, the Trib, awash in mea culpas, followed with an online “We were wrong, and we’re not going to do it anymore.”

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The very next place the story landed was at Poynter Online, the Web-based publication of the prestigious Poynter Institute, which describes itself as a “school for journalists, future journalists, and teachers of journalists.”

There, in Jim Romenesko’s daily digest of journalism industry news, was the Coloradoan’s account under the straightforward headline, “Greeley Tribune agrees to stop copying competitors’ stories.”

And that’s where the Eye, and readers everywhere, saw the most intriguing irony.

Chris Cobler, longtime executive editor of the Tribune under whose watch the ethical lapses began and continued, had just announced his hiring by the Florida-based Poynter Institute as managing editor of Poynter Online.