COPY, RIGHT?… When we last checked in with those adorable kids at County Insight, the Facebook-driven news service most notable for its heavy Salinas Jaycees/Monterey County Young Professionals presence, “anonymous columnist” Rick Raylor was railing against the help – the waitress at Outback Steakhouse, who, by Raylor’s estimation, was too busy “texting her baby’s daddy back at her section 8 apartment” to actually serve him. Things got a little quiet on the group’s page after Squid poked them, but now Squid finds it’s time to grab the dictionary and smack them with it while reading the definition of “plagiarism” aloud. As in, what the hell were you guys thinking when you copy-and-pasted entire sections of the Weekly’s calendar and posted it as original bylined content?


Insight (and Squid uses that term loosely) launched its “Entertainment in the Know” section a few weeks back. The feature was meant to function as a road map to all the great activities going on in Monterey County. Kind of like the calendar in the Weekly. Or, exactly like the calendar in the Weekly: An entry posted last week contained about 60 listings, and more than 30 of appeared to have been lifted directly from this paper. (One still carried the initials of Weekly calendar editor Walter Ryce.) Shortly after Weekly CEO Bradley Zeve sent a WTF email, CI co-founder Jerome Carlisle apologized and scrubbed the content (but didn’t provide a phone number for further discussions). If this is the future of new media, Squid needs to press inky tentacles to face and massage away the pain.


BAR BRAWL… Weekly reporters have met with Monterey County Board of Education candidate Brian Higgins to talk about his run for office, and his heart seems to be in the right place. But a source dropped an envelope on Squid’s desk that has Higgins taking time out of his campaign to clean up some business from his previous career. A man purporting to be a client from Higgins’ days as an Ohio attorney says Higgins took his case in 2005 and billed him without disclosing that his license had been suspended by the Ohio State Bar earlier that year. He also claims Higgins didn’t show up to court for his case three times, but refused to refund his legal fees. 


Higgins says he just found out about the grievance – and the Ohio Supreme Court’s resulting disciplinary action that left him indefinitely suspended – last weekend. “The claims aren’t true,” he says, adding he let his license lapse because he was no longer interested in practicing law. So why didn’t he tell his client that detail before taking on his case? No comment. “I’m in a state of cover-my-ass right now,” was his unfortunate verbiage. Might Squid suggest some legal briefs?