This week, Canadian Press issued a press release announcing some mobile portal. It sounds really impressive but it isn’t. Still, websites that specialize in rewriting press releases (or just cutting and pasting them) picked it up and regurgitated it without doing any research.

Had they done such research (and by “research”, I mean “going to the websites being talked about”), they might have noticed that the French version, nouvellesmobile.ca, doesn’t have a word of French on it. Oh, and the website asks us to “enter your US mobile phone number”, basically because this CP website just redirects to the Associated Press version.

Memo to CP: Before announcing websites, maybe it would be best to do some sanity checks first.