How a CNBC reporter created a website to steal her stories

Meg Graham of CNBC.com writes about how she created a fake news website to steal her stories and place them around ads.

Graham writes, “I bought a domain through GoDaddy and set up a managed WordPress site, then set up an SSL certificate so I would have a secure website, which would prevent the site from triggering security warnings on browsers like Google’s Chrome. I downloaded a theme that made my site look somewhat like a news website, made a favicon (the little image that shows up in Google search and in your browser tab) and gave myself a name: The ‘Tribune Times Today.’

“To populate my site with content, I first copied and pasted text from CNBC stories manually. Then I learned how to speed the process with scrapers — simple software plug-ins you can download on WordPress and can scrape stories using RSS feeds or individual links. A lot of fraudulent news sites will also scrape images from stories, but I avoided that for legal reasons. Instead, I stuck with stock images I was allowed to use on the site, or my own images from industry events I had saved on my phone.

“I spent a couple hours on a Sunday afternoon tweaking the site, setting up fancy-looking widgets to show my ‘top stories’ or a carousel display of stories and pulling stories until I had more than 50 posts.

“Then I was ready to find some advertisers.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.