The Newquay Voice has poked fun at rival the Newquay Guardian after it put faked pictures of a great white shark said to be off the coast of Cornwall on its front page.
The Voice sent one of its journalists over to the offices of Guardian wearing a shark suit.
The Newquay Voice spoke to the man responsible for sending the pictures to the paper who admitted he had taken the pictures in Africa and sent them in as a prank.
The Guardian carried the story on its front page and the story was picked up by The Sun and the rest of the national media.
Publisher and acting editor of the Voice Andrew Laming said: ‘We broke the story that the pictures were rubbish. One of our reporters bumped into the photographer in a bar and he was quite candid about the fact it was a load of rubbish.
‘They did contact him but in fairness he supplied some very easily disprovable bits of information about which any one living in the town would know unlikely to be true. The fishing boat he said he was on was sold 15 years ago to a fisherman in North Scotland and hasn’t been back since. He said the picture was taken from 100 meters away but it was taken looking down into the water. It raises questions about a local newspaper should be acting like the Daily Sport or whether they should take their civic role more seriously. It’s obviously silly season.”
Head of content at the Newquay Guardian Matt Dixon has defended his paper saying a series of checks had been made and said he was ‘sceptical’about the Voice’s sources.
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