Some online ads look like stories – but they're not

Editor’s note: Online Editor Lici Beveridge presents a weekly column explaining the features of our website, www.hattiesburgamerican.com.

I recently received a call from an online reader who was asking about a story that allegedly ran in our paper about a woman who made a lot of money working from home.

I searched several days’ worth of papers since I was unfamiliar with the story, but could not find it anywhere. yet, the caller was insistent she read it on our site.

After an extensive conversation with the caller and trying to retrace her steps, I found the story, but it was never in our paper or anywhere on our website.

The “story” was actually an ad placed on a site that aggregates news content based on your location to bring you the latest news from your community.

Some of the stories were actually on our website and links were provided back to the real stories.

The “story” that the caller was asking about was actually an advertisement that was made to look like a news story.

When I looked at the source of the story, it said it was written by someone who works for something that sounded like an official newspaper name, but it was not one that I had ever heard of. The “newspaper” also was based somewhere in New York.

If anything, that gave me an inkling that the story was probably not accurately portrayed. If the story and person were real, most likely the person would have told their local newspaper about it rather than some “newspaper” somewhere in New York.

Another clue was the same story – featuring the same person – appeared on another website later on, yet this time the woman who made all the money was from Ridgeland instead of Hattiesburg.

My suggestion is to use caution when seeing stories like this. If you have doubt about the veracity of a story or its source, look it up. If you think it’s on our website and can’t find it there, it probably came from somewhere else.

And, of course, you should probably heed the old saying, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

Some online ads look like stories – but they're not


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