How did the Target memo (official Redbird death) story broke out on 10/13/15
It is not important in the scheme of things (or maybe not at all), but I read today many blog reports about how the Target memo story broke out yesterday (Oct 13) and on most of them I'm not seeing any mention or reference/linking to my
breaking news post; for that matter I'm seeing many bloggers implying on their posts that they were the ones to break the story and confirm Redbird’s death via the memo; others then refer to those posts as the one who broke the story. Which could have been justified were it not for the fact that I linked my story to many of these bloggers' threads as a comment (therefore personally told them) at least a couple of hours before any of them made any mention of the internal Target memo or the official death of Redbird via other confirmations.
I obviously wasn’t thinking at the time about buying time from when I published the story and they would also publish about it, so they couldn’t make claims, nor should I have. I wanted to spread the news as soon as I found out so most people would find out ASAP about it and stop being in limbo. I first linked my post about the Target memo as a comment on the Redbird thread here/
Flyertalk (10/13/15 @ 6:53 pm EST) since I know that was the most popular Redbird thread. Shortly after I also posted on
Reddit,
DansDeals the various aforementioned blogs and others.
All this, as far as the timing of the posts and who published what first, is publicly verifiable by anyone who wants to look at the times when each of us posted regarding the official RB death via the memo, on Twitter and other third-party websites which we don’t own. Here’s my tweet about it, posted on Oct 13 at 7:05 pm EST:
https://twitter.com/NoonRadar/status/654070358518140928. I obviously can’t assert that there’s no other earlier tweets/pots about the story, but I did look at when several well-known bloggers first posted on Twitter about it; it was hours after me.
Further, after I broke the story last night, someone who claimed to work at Target direct-messaged me on Twitter a couple of times asking for my email address about this news. I was reluctant at first but then gave him my email, he then shortly sent a group email to me and a bunch of popular MS bloggers, some of whom posted about the memo and official RB death later last night (10/13), others today (10/14).
This email was also sent to us last night (10/13) after I posted the story and before any of these bloggers posted about it: 8:41 pm EST (about 2 hours after I linked to my story on Flyertalk). On his group-email, the Target team member linked to my post saying among other things “I can unfortunately confirm that the memo NoonRader references here is 100% accurate”. He had seen the reports and had gone to the Target store where he works, looked around and saw the memo himself. He said he couldn’t send us the pic of the memo. Shortly after that, the pics of it started to be published on blogs. Grant (of
Travel with Grant) replied to the same group email last night with a pic of the memo, just a few mins after the Target employee email.
A couple of hours after I broke the story last night, I didn’t have internet access for pretty much the rest of the night, plus I was otherwise engaged, so I saw the details of these emails this morning, which is when I published on my original/yesterday’s post the pic (a version of it) that Grant had emailed last night.
What baffles me about this (how the story was portrayed to have been broken and by whom) is that some of these bloggers are very reputable, so I would have not expected it from them. Also, I’m not really competition to them; I don’t yet have a blog per se (I posted the news on the website which I had primarily set up for other purposes), so I don’t get it. At first I wasn’t going to say much about it, then I kept seeing today blog post after blog post to such effect, so it ticked me a bit; here I am venting about it (and setting the record straight, for what little that's worth).
I didn’t really expect to be the one scooping up the Target memo story and confirming Redbird’s death yesterday; it just bothered me that there was no confirmation still, so I went out visiting a couple of Target stores in the afternoon, probing managers about it until the second manager showed me the memo.
There's no doubt that the news about the memo and/or the memo itself would have surfaced out eventually; there's
too many people who used to MS with Redbird). However, being the first one (as far as I know) to have broken the memo story and then have published the news all over the MS forums, I'd like to think that I contributed something yesterday. So yeah, it doesn't seem nice or fair reading some bloggers implying they were the ones to break the story instead and/or pretending that they they didn't see my post about it or the email from the Target team member.
Maybe this was too much to expect on my part and not important at all for them to have referenced/mentioned my post. Maybe I will look at this tomorrow and think this is much ado about nothing. Now, however, it doesn't seem so to me, certainly not for bloggers who have staked their fame & success in part on their integrity.
In any case, RIP Redbird!
P.S. I know this is not helpful to anything we need to do moving forward after Redbird's death so I apologize in advance for having taken up space here as such.
For my part, later today I will write up a guide to closing Redbird and signing up for Serve and Bluebird, as well as other relevant info, as much as I know. There's many others who have posted about it already, I'm sure, just as there will be more to do so.