Earlier today, we reported that KJ Noons had signed with the UFC and would be making his debut against Melvin Guillard at the Ultimate Fight Night 18 show on April 1st, 2009. Another site, which we won’t link to here for reasons you’ll soon discover, stole our report and published it as their own exclusive.
This site has a habit of stealing from other mixed martial arts websites and claiming exclusives on them, which in fact they’re simply recycling material they’ve found elsewhere. As a matter of fact, Inside Fights staffer Brian Oswald and I were having a conversation about the Noons story before we published it, and Brian wondered out loud how long it would take the other site to steal the story and publish. Not long, it turns out.
We have since confirmed with two separate sources close to Noons and the UFC that no deal has been reached for Noons to join the company, nor has there been any advanced discussions regarding a contract. I’d heard rumors of the fight last night, so I reached out to a usually reliable source to see if they could shed any light on the story, and that source confirmed to me that Noons had already signed a contract and would be facing Guillard. As it turns out, the source either had bad information, had read the rumors and decided there was something to them, or intentionally misled me; I’m not sure which.
I’d like to apologize for publishing the errant story. One of the first rules of journalism is to double-check scoops, no matter how reliable the original source may be, and I broke that rule by posting the story without first confirming it with another source.
