Media News

Dallas Morning News files lawsuit against website for stealing stories

Thou shalt not steal their words.

UPDATE 8-20-2021: The Dallas Morning News settled its lawsuit against Holly Starks. The lawsuit was "dismissed with prejudice," and a statement said that "Defendants have now agreed to remove all copies of Dallas Morning News content from their websites, and to not reproduce or distribute Dallas Morning News content in the future without a license."

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The Dallas Morning News is going after a website creator for stealing its articles.

The newspaper filed a lawsuit against Holly Starks, a website creator and "SEO queen" for copyright infringement, and asks for injunctive relief and damages.

Starks, who is based in Wisconsin, runs a business providing search engine optimization (SEO) services and internet marketing.

She makes money by setting up websites under the umbrella of "Holly's News Network," including city-themed news sites such as dailydallasnews.com, dailychicagonews.com, dailyphoenixnews.com, and dailyneworleansnews.com.

Her sites lift stories from other sources, including CultureMap, but the stories get altered slightly via the use of online translation software, which changes a word here or there to avoid detection.

In a February 2021 interview on YouTube, she says she found a list of the top 100 cities in the U.S. and made a site for each. "I don't even write the content, it's all pulled in — I don't even log into these sites anymore," she says.

Part of what rankles the newspaper in the lawsuit is her disregard for their overtures and her bragging about her techniques:

"Plaintiff has repeatedly notified Starks that she is infringing on Plaintiff's copyrights, but Defendants continue to willfully and knowingly misappropriate and infringe on Plaintiff's copyrights in its content. Plaintiff has submitted numerous takedown requests pursuant to the DMCA, requesting that Plaintiff's content be removed from the Infringing Sites. But rather than complying with these requests, Defendants have knowingly and willfully disregarded Plaintiff's copyright claims."

Instead of complying, Starks moved the websites to hosting services that ignore rules established by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The lawsuit even includes a screenshot of a March 6 post from Starks' Facebook page:

Holly Starks
March 6 ·
This one company keeps sending me DMCA. I have moved the one site now 5x to different hosting. Now I’m pissed. Just picked up Offshore hosting and DMCA ignored hosting. And now I just submitted 30 more news sites in his city. That’s what you get when you troll me.

It's kind of funny that she's "pissed" about getting caught stealing, almost as if she doesn't understand that what she's doing is theft? In her interview, she states outright that she's rewriting others' stories.

"Who's writing your content?" asks interviewer Chase Reiner.
"It's RSS feed," she says.
"What? You're just feeding other people's content into them?" Reiner says.
"We're rewriting it through plug-ins and then posting it," she says.
"So you're spinning up the content and posting it," Reiner says.
"Let's say the article is 500 words, we're only spinning like 20 words," she says.

She then seems to acknowledge the DMN's objections.

"But one newspaper in Texas does not like me pulling their feed," she says. "I forward that page to a different interface and my hosting was fine with that, I didn't get in any trouble."

The Dallas Morning News is no stranger to cough cough finding inspiration for its stories from other sites, a recent example being its June 29 story on hammerhead worms. But cutting and pasting words verbatim is next level, and gloating about it will not be tolerated.

The lawsuit may have already had an effect. On July 1, while Starks' other city sites such as dailyneworleansnews.com were still online, dailydallasnews.com was down with an "Error 521" displayed.

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population report

Booming Dallas suburb was the fastest-growing city in the U.S. in 2024

City of Dallas - City Hall/Facebook

Dallas' population has grown to nealry 1.33 million residents.

The Dallas suburb of Princeton grew faster than any other city in the United States in 2024, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The new population report said Princeton's population has more than doubled in the last five years. The city saw a dramatic growth rate of 30.6 percent from July 2023 to July 2024, now boasting a population of just over 37,000 residents. The suburb is located 42 miles northeast from downtown Dallas.

The report also revealed Dallas retained its No. 9 spot on the list of the 15 most populous cities in the U.S. Dallas gained more than 23,000 residents during the one-year period, bringing the city's population to 1,326,087 people in 2024.

Elsewhere across North Texas, Fort Worth surpassed 1 million residents and eclipsed Austin as the 11th largest city in the nation. Fort Worth had the fifth-highest numeric increase in population last year, 23,442 residents, to bring the city's total population to 1,008,106 residents.

Houston and San Antonio were the only Texas cities to have higher numerical growth rates than Fort Worth. Houston gained 43,217 residents – the second-highest increase nationwide – while San Antonio ranked No. 4 in growth with an additional 23,945 residents.

Austin has yet to surpass the 1 million population threshold and has a population of 993,588 residents, the report says. The city now ranks 13th on the list of most populous U.S. cities after ranking 11th in 2024.

Sandwiched between No. 11-Fort Worth and No. 13-Austin is San Jose, California, whose population of 997,368 puts it in the 12-largest spot.

Fastest growing U.S. cities
Six additional Texas cities made the list of fastest-growing U.S. cities, with several in the DFW Metroplex:

Fulshear, near Houston (No. 2) with 26.7 percent growth (54,629 total population)
Celina (No. 4) with 18.2 percent growth (51,661 total population)
Anna (No. 5) with 14.6 percent growth (31,986 total population)
Fate (No. 8) with 11.4 percent growth (27,467 total population)
Melissa (No. 11) with 10 percent growth (26,194 total population)
Hutto, near Austin (No. 13) with 9.4 percent growth (42,661 total population)

The Austin suburb of Georgetown's growth has continued to slow since 2023, and it no longer appears in the list of fastest-growing cities. However, it did surpass 100,000 residents in 2024.

San Angelo, a small city in West Texas, also surpassed the 100,000-population threshold.

Most populous U.S. cities in 2024
New York City maintained its stronghold as the biggest in America in 2024, boasting a population of nearly 8.5 million residents. Los Angeles and Chicago also retained second and third place, with respective populations of nearly 3.88 million and more than 2.7 million residents.

"Cities in the Northeast that had experienced population declines in 2023 are now experiencing significant population growth, on average," said Crystal Delbé, a statistician in the Census Bureau’s Population Division. "In fact, cities of all sizes, in all regions, showed faster growth and larger gains than in 2023, except for small cities in the South, whose average population growth rate remained the same."

The 15 populous U.S. cities as of July 1, 2024 were:

No. 1 – New York, New York (8.48 million)
No. 2 – Los Angeles, California (3.88 million)
No. 3 – Chicago, Illinois (2.72 million)
No. 4 – Houston, Texas (2.39 million)
No. 5 – Phoenix, Arizona (1.67 million)
No. 6 – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1.57 million)
No. 7 – San Antonio, Texas (1.53 million)
No. 8 – San Diego, California (1.4 million)
No. 9 – Dallas, Texas (1.33 million)
No. 10 – Jacksonville, Florida (1 million)
No. 11 – Fort Worth, Texas (1 million)
No. 12 – San Jose, California (997,368)
No. 13 – Austin, Texas (993,588)
No. 14 – Charlotte, North Carolina (943,476)
No. 15 – Columbus, Ohio (933,263)

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