Water district no longer using website dropped by Google News

Central Basin Municipal Water District officials said they were unaware of questions over the authorship of stories written about the agency by a news website and have instructed their public relations consultant to stop using the site.

The Times reported this week that it could not verify the biographical information of many staff writers at News Hawks Review, which published more than 30 articles about the water district over the last year. The Times found that photos purporting to be of some News Hawks writers were available on other websites as stock images.

The district, which serves more than 2 million residents in southeast Los Angeles County, became aware only recently that some of the reporters listed on the site were “fictional,” spokeswoman Valerie Howard said Thursday.

“This website, and the bylines and the people who wrote for it, we didn’t know anything about it,” Howard said. “As far as we knew these were real writers.”

News Hawks’ coverage of Central Basin began after the district hired public relations consultant Ed Coghlan last year. Under the deal, the district agreed to pay Coghlan’s firm in exchange for services that included producing positive stories and placing them as news articles on Google News.

After The Times first reported on the website in September, Google News removed News Hawks from its search index. It was at that point that the district instructed Coghlan to no longer use the website, Howard said.

Central Basin officials found out about the bylines from Coghlan later, she said, adding that the district would have stopped using News Hawks had it known about the issue.

Most of the articles about Central Basin appeared under the byline of Mike Adams, whom News Hawks claimed was a former magazine writer and TV veteran with a degree in construction sciences from Westminster College.