I have a google alert on my name. Yes, I am weird. But I am also curious to see where my name pops up. After all, if some day someone important googles me, I want to have a sense of what they’ll find. (And I bet most people who think I’m weird are the same people who just never thought to do it for their own name but, starting today, they will.)

Sometimes my name comes up in strange far-flung places. A recent story I wrote about how the cold weather can make pipes freeze and cause all sorts of havoc has been interesting to follow. It was picked up by Gannett News Service.

What’s actually been interesting is how much it’s been rewritten. It’s the same general reporting (same sources, quotes and sidebar). But I’ve seen several different written versions of it still under my byline. Here are the first five paragraphs of my version and some others:

My original:

Kevin Gutwein was dealt a double dose of bad luck Monday night.

As temperatures fell to seasonal lows, the Lafayette resident realized both his furnace was broken and a water line into his house had frozen and burst.

“It was one of those times you stand there and look at each other and say, ‘Why did we buy a house that was built in 1880?’ ” Gutwein said.

It actually wasn’t the first time his family dealt with frozen pipes. In fact, when he realized the water pressure in the sink had fallen, he thought, “Aw man, this is what happened last year.”

Gutwein was not alone in his troubles. Suzie Kelsey, dispatcher at Brenneco Inc. plumbing company, which serviced Gutwein, spent Tuesday morning trying to keep up with all the customers with frozen pipes.

At the Citizen-Times in Asheville, North Carolina:

After a brief warm spell, the deep freeze is back in Western North Carolina. Temperatures are dipping into the teens at night and hovering in the 30s during the day.

Better check out your pipes and prevent a costly break.

“When weather like this occurs, we go into emergency mode,” says Randy Lynch, service manager for Brenneco plumbing in Lafayette, Ind.

But when temperatures ease, the problems won’t go away.

“Whenever a pipe freezes, if it’s copper especially, it expands and splits the pipe,” says Reggie Roy, owner of L&R Plumbing. “When it thaws out, that’s when you find out.”

And up at the Green Bay Press-Gazette, my story takes on the following:

For Kevin Gutwein, history repeated itself on a frigid morning.

As he turned on the faucet in his kitchen, he found that the water had slowed to a trickle and realized a water line into his house had frozen and burst — just like last year.

“It was one of those times you stand there and look at each other and say, ‘Why did we buy a house that was built in 1880?’ ” Gutwein says.

But houses built more recently aren’t immune. Any home with pipes in an unheated crawl space, set in concrete beneath a garage floor or in an attic where temperatures fluctuate is vulnerable to frozen pipes.

“When weather like this occurs, we go into emergency mode,” says Randy Lynch, service manager for Brenneco plumbing in Lafayette.

Now, I don’t care so much about the ledes being changed or reworked or the stories rearranged. I’m not one of those people who is married to her ledes. Sometimes other people have better ideas and what works for me might not work for them. It’s the message that matters. In fact, on shorter items, even getting credit seems unnecessary for me. After a summer where at least half of what I did went without a byline, I realized having the byline glory was not what it was about. My editors are trying to re-train me to put a credit on the quick-hit shorter stories.

My point isn’t so much, therefore, that these stories were rewritten while retaining my byline. I don’t care. It’s just interesting to me as I don’t think it’s ever occured on a story by me before. (Granted, most of what I write has a smaller, local scope.) So I don’t know if this is common or normal practice, but my hunch is it must be. Either way, it’s an interesting phenomenon.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 18th, 2007 at 2:40 am and is filed under Commentary, Journalism, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.