Sound and Fury: Here's What Sharon Waxman Really Wants

Sharon Waxman, who runs a website called the Wrap, which covers show business, continues to accuse Newser of various ethical sleights of hand with regard to the way we present the news and the way we occasionally cover the Wrap's stories. Her claims are so exaggerated, and big lie-like, that, in my suspicion of anyone shouting about ethics in a crowded theater, it suddenly occurred to me to run a quick ethical search on her.

It is not only that a quick search shows her site doing even more blatantly and systematically what she accuses us of doing -- taking a free-ride on other people's content. There's something else I turned up:

When Waxman was a reporter at the New York Times, she wrote an over-the-top laudatory article about how Starbucks' CEO Howard Schultz was making aggressive investments in the entertainment business. Waxman and the Wrap, in surely the appearance of trading the Times' positive coverage for personal gain, became one of Schultz's investments.

Building businesses is hard. One might be inclined to take every advantage. Curiously, Waxman's real issues with Newser are small ones: She wants, she says, an in-story link on several old summaries of Wrap stories where the in-story link (separate from two other links) was omitted; and she wants the word "Wrap" to be hot-linked on our source page. This could have been accomplished with a friendly email.

Except this isn't what Waxman wants.

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