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The State of Stripe Hype
On behalf of the Fan-Sided Blogs network, I wanted to come on here and make a statement.
First off, we want to thank ex-blogger Dave Howard, who recently resigned from this gig, for his service. Even though we disagreed on this situation, Dave’s a nice guy, a soldier and patriot and was a solid blogger and part of our team.
The word team, however, is an important part of what I am going to get to.
When the Bengals decided to sue us, they served papers to my brother, not Dave, and we were the ones under fire. It is easy for a blogger to sit here and want to fight the good fight when he won’t potentially lose thousands of dollars and a family small business he is passionate about.
Were we happy about the suit? Fuck no, we weren’t. We found their claims to “Welcome to the Jungle” and the team’s colors redunkulous. At the same time, we knew we were coming to a misslefight with a plastic butter knife, so, yeah, from our POV we had no choice but to fight for what we could keep and then remove all of the Bengals’ trademarks from our site.
Our plan was to make the changes, and then fight the Bengals with our blog, our words and our humor after the fact. Our blogger wanted to straight up fight the case, and launched an attack before we had any idea what was going on, and before he had even read the letter. We have never censored any blogger of ours, but in the end this is our blog and our network, and, again, it was our asses being sued. Additionally, we knew this fight could damage each of our blogs and our league-wide relationship with the NFL. We simply unpublished the post until we could hold a phone conversation with said blogger, so we could get on the same page. He refused and quit.
We have put his post back up, because he has complained about it and refuses to talk to us about it or change it, even after reading the letter and having all the facts. Again, we are not into censorship, so we put the post back up promptly.
We just wanted to:
A.) Officially state that while we are cooperating with the Bengals, we are not happy about this suit and think it’s bullshit. Going to court is just not the smart fight for us at all at this time. I will say the the Bengals are delusional if they think we are the ones doing its franchise “irreparable harm.” Um, I think Chris Henry, Odell Thurmon and Co. handled that long before Stripe Hype’s inception.
B.) State that we have done everything we can to help Dave and Stripe Hype, but we must defend ourselves when we are being accuse of censorship. We don’t censor our bloggers, we were simply trying to step back, take a deep breath and look at what was best for the network, something a certain someone didn’t want to do. We promptly put the blog post back up when we knew this is what he wanted to do regardless of our input. If anything, I’d call it temporary screening, lol…
That’s our unofficial official statement on the matter. We are cooperating with the suit, amicably parting ways with Dave and seeking a new blogger (e-mail us at fansided@gmail.com).
Thanks for reading…
- Adam Best
Fan-Sided Blogs Co-Director
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The papers were served on Zach and his brother, not me. However, since I have been the sole content contributor for months to stripehype, I felt like I had a very big stake in what was going on, especially since it was a business, and that their revenue from this site was coming from my efforts, I wanted to be included in the decision making process of how to respond to the Bengals. I was not included, Zach and Adam made the sole choices of how to respond, without even consulting an attorney (which I did within 1 hour of seeing the actual document). I was in the process of hiring the lawyer on my own dime to respond to the NFL/Bengals, and no, I did not inform Zach of this at the time, mainly because he started taking things offline before i evern knew what was up. He had that document for days before sharing it with me, thus not allowing me time to help solve the problem. As a former business owner myself, it is very lame for Zach to say “It is easy for a blogger to sit here and want to fight the good fight when he won’t potentially lose thousands of dollars and a family small business he is passionate about.”. My passion has always been about whatever I put time into (and I was spending hours on this site weekly, and on other projects like podcasting with catcrave.com). So to minimize my jeopardy in this process is pretty lame.
As for refusing to call, that is a blatant mistruth. I emailed Zach yesterday and said I would be calling last night. After seeing another blogger had spoken to Zach and had quoted him as ripping me, I chose not to call. Again, since my reputation within the writing field is equally as important and valuable to me as fansided is to Zach and Adam, I deserved to be included in the decision making process of how to handle it. I was not, they made the decisions, then after I went on a public tirade, they wanted me to call to work something out before I went public. At that point, his “temporary screening” had already occured, without even emailing me that he was going to do it. That doesn’t seem like the actions of someone trying to be above board, it looks and smells like the actions of someone simply covering his own ass and running scared, without even contacting legal counsel to learn of options (which, I have learned, were very wide in this matter).
I agree with Adam’s statement in letter A, but disagree with how letter B is represented. I asked Zach to put my posting back up in 2 emails, and he did not, he simply kept emailing me asking me to call him (I work during the day and cannot make phone calls. I did not remind him of that, but it was something we’ve spoken of in the past, as he has spoken to me on the phone before). When I sent an email stating that taking that posting down violating every tenant of the freedom of being a blogger, and that he should be sued for first amendment violation, the posting was back online in 15 minutes, again he didn’t even contact me to tell me he had reposted it.
While I do not harbor ill will towards Zach and Adam, and solely despise the Bengals, I will not be the victim of halftruths or “colorful colloquialisms”. I wanted to fight the Bengals yes, but I wasn’t even included in the decision making, but I am the generator of whatever revenue this site makes. I was more than willing to take a backseat and let them choose the path to take. I just wasn’t willing to be some sucker left out in the dark. I didn’t even get a copy of the NFL letter until the site had already been stripped down.
One thing though, I have been in contact with several outlets, and today on the Jim Rome show, it was mentioned for about a 90 second commentary. I am going to ensure the Bengals get negative attention from this entire ordeal, because what they did was simply ridiculous. I have an interview scheduled for Friday as well. I will always be supportive of fansided and the work these bloggers do. I just think that Adam and Zach need to look at the lead bloggers from every site as partners in the process, since they spend countless hours doing the work, for little to no pay, for the “family business” Zach and Adam seek to protect.
May 7th, 2008 at 1:05 pmA couple of quick points, and then we’ll close the book on this one under the agree-to-disagree file and close comments since David got to say his piece.
May 7th, 2008 at 3:21 pmFirst off, Zach and I didn’t have the time nor money to hire legal representation for this, especially over how miniscule, even though also ridiculous, the Bengals demands were. Keep in mind that we have hectic lives FSB and its 30 blogs nonwithstanding. We just didn’t think taking any legal measures were the best course of action here, and acted swiftly after reaching that decision.
Also, Dave was e-mailed IMMEDIATELY after I received notification from the lawyers about this warning. I told him at that time that we would be cooperating even though we weren’t happy about it because the requests weren’t that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things, and that we weren’t prepared to take on the Bengals or the NFL on this one. Additionally, because of positive relationships with other sites and NFL teams we didn’t want to do anything that would have a negative impact on those relationships. Dave also was contacted that his post would temporarily be unavailable–NOT PULLED, CENSORED OR EDITED–while we talked things out with him and the lawyers.
As far as David’s claim to being the sole generator of revenue, that is the greatest mistruth of them all. We built and launched this site, own the server, paid for every nickel, update it constantly, helped Dave get up to speed on blogging after we found and hired him, help market the site…Dave did one thing–show up and blog. And our bloggers are well aware of the details of the gig when they are hired, and our lead bloggers are paid, just to clarify a few other things.
The main thing was that it wasn’t Dave’s ass on the line here, nor is this site his. It was our decision to make, we had to act swiftly and we kept him informed, but made the decision we felt we had to.
We think Dave is a terrific writer and person, we just wish he would have not taken the route he did and gone public with some things that easily could have been handled internally with better communication, i.e. a quick phone call during a work break or last night.
Neither one of us (Zach or I) have smeared Dave. We just wanted to handle the situation with the Bengals our way since this is our site, our network and our asses on the line, and also because we are protecting the best interests of our 30 or so other bloggers. Dave disagreed with that approach.
My suggestion to Dave is to start his own blog for this fight, that way we’ll be able to handle our lawsuit the way we want to and he can have carte blanche in his P.R. battle with the Bengals.
Good luck, Dave. No hard feelings, we just did what we felt was best given the circumstances.