Medway News.

Medway's finest free paper (also sold for 45p in shops, despite coming through your door for free) did me the great honour a few weeks ago of borrowing heavily from my report on the Horsham YMCA match, and in two instances, copying and pasting my work. I penned a long and well thought out argument about this, which I have held pending their next move. The posting that will never appear was quite sympathetic, referring to the new culture of slacker hacks chained to keyboards, fed stories from news agencies and newswire, starved of imagination and the time to report rather than regurgitate. But I chose not to post this.

I chose to wait and see what would happen. Humorously, it would appear that my post of the 26th August, where I comically referred to such a culture before spewing out my own mixed grill of reportage on the Croydon game, did enough to put them off. I joked about other people stealing other writers' work. At this point, I had no idea what the News had done - it wasn't published until the 27th. Since then, the illustrious News hasn't given one column inch to the Chats. I'd like to think that this is in no part due to my comments. I'm completely independent of the club, so I don't see why they should suffer over a potential misunderstanding between the News and this blog.

I'm not a journo by trade. I don't aspire to be. This blog is for the sake of independent thought on all things Chatham Town and non league, and probably in time, anything else that takes my fancy, perhaps even cakes. But please don't copy my work and pass it off. The very idea of this blog's independence is undermined by such actions.

Thank you.