Why and When Does the Media Cover Lawsuits?

That was my big question on Friday. That day I read the Wired article about the litigation between Maponics (one of the neighborhood boundaries companies) and a fellow name Bernt Wahl (who owns another neighborhood boundaries company, Factle) over what I understand as a contract dispute.

I read the article carefully, noting an apparent typo which cited the litigation as occurring in Nov 2008. That’s what shook me out of “interesting story I should blog” to “this is weird.” I poked around and found Web citations on the suit from Nov 2007. If the suit was that old, why was Wired running an apparently new story on it now? Was there something new in the case? The article didn’t give any clue as to why the suit was important now. So, instead of blogging it, I pinged a few people: the president of Maponics, Darrin Clement who comments here now and again, Bernt Wahl and the Wired reporter.

The upshot thus far: The date of the suit has been corrected to Nov 2007 in the article and Clement (with the ok from lawyers) offered a comment to the Wired article with some perspective and additional corrections. Other commenters offer additional layers of complexity.