IT’S one of the most boring but obvious truths: imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery.

Take Granada Reports’ piece tonight on charity shops in Southport, which profiled how the owner of Divine, on Lord Street, blamed them for the demise of his own business. I enjoyed watching it when I got back from The Champion offices earlier today, so much so that the fact we ran it nearly two weeks ago didn’t bother me.

That was our February 24 edition, and even though that story didn’t make it onto the Champnews website, a follow up by my colleague Henry James did, four days before ITV’s news crews showed up. But it’s flattering rather than irritating that they’ve followed up on what was a hundred word, byline-free nib hidden away in a corner of page five an eternity (in news terms) ago.

It’s also flattering that The Visiter and Southport GB followed it up, and it will be further flattering if it gets onto BBC Merseyside, Click Liverpool, or Dune FM’s Live From Studio One show. News happens and any journo, whether it’s their exclusive or not, picks it up. That’s just how we work and – frustrating as it might seem behind closed doors – there’s always a sense of fair play and being sporting about each other’s stories.

So you can’t help but wince when you read one media outlet openly attacking another, as you might have read on Southport GB once you’d got past their take on the charity shops story.

They’ve claimed that the way this sports report, written by Steve Crane, mysteriously appeared word-for-word in the sports pages of last Friday’s Southport Visiter under Steve Crane's name (and then anonymously on their website) is “blatant theft”. They even choose to run the story under the lovely and impartial headline:

“Local Rag Pilfer Steve Crane’s SGB report”

A spokesperson for the website then goes on to attack The Visiter for running what it claims as its own story, saying:

“This is not the first time they have done this sort of thing. The local rag trawl Southport.gb.com all day long looking for news stories, it’s comical really, but they should get off their backsides and find their own stories.”

I’ve no idea who wrote the story for who, or why it appeared in the paper’s sports pages, or even what it’s really about (sports is the only section of any newspaper I find genuinely boring), but I can say one thing. Most of the colourful comments on Southport GB, as I found with the pyjamas piece, are written by people who write under pseudonyms to conceal their true identity. Even the Southport GB “spokesperson” won’t come clean.

I don’t deny they get lots of hits and cover lots of stories neither we nor The Visiter have the time to, but some of the comments are hardly the sort of thing the NCTJ or the Press Complaints Commission would view lightly.

And I say that as David Simister, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

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