JOURNALISTIC AMENITIES. Petty Larceny.

Waikato Times, Volume XIV, Issue 1216, 15 April 1880, Page 2

JOURNALISTIC AMENITIES. Petty Larceny.

casions have we remarked that items of news published in our columns have been cooly appropriated by the Herald without acknowledgment, and lately he lias taken to abstracting all important items of Waikato news, more especially those relating to the question of the outbreak of pleuro in this district. Nobody can, of course, form a better idea of the money, time, and trouble expended in collecting country news, in a district of such scattered proportions, than ourselves. We have had a pretty varied experience, and can speak with some degree of confidence. Know this, therefore, and knowing also that the Herald aspires to the rank of a first-class country newspaper, and being unwilling to check anyone in the exercise of an ambition so laudable, we have never objected to our contemporary using our reports of the meetings of the Cattle Boards, &c, so long as he had the common courtesy to acknowledge the source of his information. To do so would have been to rob the leading journal (Heaven save the mark) of this district of all interest for its Waikato readers. From a feeling ■ of respect to these latter then we have stifled our indignation, and have continued to pay for the Herald's reporting. But our contemporary has waxed fat on our forebearance, and with obesity has come its attendant sprite, Affrontry. In yesterday's issue we observed a very full [ and correct report of Saturday's meeting of the Cattle Board, and we at first concluded, as it was under the heading "From ©ur own Correspondent " that, awakening to a sense of shame, the Herald had actually gone to the expense of getting- its own report ; and while we [ regretted that so admirable a purloiner was about to be lost to the country, we rejoiced to find that the confidence some people placed in our contemporary had not been thrown away. We could not, however, divest our mind of an impression that there was a familial 1 ring in the report, and the more we read tho more familiar did it become, till at length we camo to regard it quite as an old friend, who had left us for a brief space and returned again to the friendly circle And so in truth it was, having only left us the previous day through the vehicle of our own columns. Slightly altered in attire, the scissors having robbed his coat of its fair proportions, we now had no longer any doubt of our friend's identity. To drop allegory, we have simply to accuse the Herald, not only of larceny, but of an attempt to conceal its commission under the most plausible pretences. We need not inform our readers that our information is obtained at considerable cost, and that we have always had a shorthand j reporter at the meetings above referred to. To all the advantages which accrue from thi«, our contemporary is, as we have snkl, welcome — so long, of course, as a gentlemanly instinct prompts him to render due acknowledgment, but when such a mean, dishonorable course as we have <le*crib d i* resorted to we cannot hesitate to hold him up to the opprobruna which he so richly merits,