Complaint Review: All Headline News - AHN Media - W. Jeffrey Brown - West Palm Beach Florida

My saga with All Headline News began in October of 2006 when I was hired as a part time sports writer. I was pretty guarded with my writing while I "learned the ropes" and figured out the style, until I was offered to come aboard full time in March of 2007 with a hefty salary increase.

I'll back up and say that my very first paycheck from AHN was received a few weeks later than normal, and only until after I called to check and see what the problem was. That was my first warning sign.

After accepting the new responsibilites, everything seemed to be going according to plan the first two months. I got another email from W. Jeffrey Brown, the CEO of All Headline News that stated myself and three other sports editors were getting additional salary increases.

The very first check I received from this increase, which was scheduled to take affect July 1st, bounced for non-sufficient funds.

I put in a call to Mr. Brown about the situation as well as to another lead editor to get an explanation. I got a reply saying that his records showed the check had cleared the bank and he would have accounting look into the matter and get back to me on Monday.

I found out about my check bouncing while eating dinner on a Saturday night with my wife and 2-year old child. My debit card was declined after the meal. After checking my balance in a nearby ATM, I noticed the descrepancy in funds. Even more bad news, I had already written checks against the deposit and didn't find out until a week later the check did not clear.

I racked up $75 dollars in fees for this.

I got home and logged onto an online messenger system AHN had for its staff and chatted with two other sports writers who were working their shifts that night. One of them told me this had happened to two other people, so I decided then and there I would not perform any more work for AHN until this matter had been resolved to my satisfaction. Something just wasn't right.

My lead editor was away on vacation at the time and I left him a message stating what I was doing and why. He was dilligent in taking time away to research as best he could what the problem was.

I found out Monday morning (after two days of waiting) that 14 employees of AHN had checks bounce and that a bridge loan was going to be issued to AHN to cover the checks while a police investigation was being held.

The explanation given was that someone had accessed the AHN account and cashed a series of fraudulent checks.

Only problem was, Mr. Brown failed to inform any of the 14 people directly affected by this through a phone call or email. He held a conference call and let other staff know about the "problem". I would think in the interest of showing some type of support for your employees, you could communicate an issue of this importance to those directly affected. But that's just me.

I didn't understand why the CEO of the company took such a lackadaisacal approach to dealing with the issue for his staff. I know several of the people were like me and depended on the paycheck to help feed our families.

As I told Mr. Brown in a later conversation, I didn't feel he appropiately handled the situation. It would have been as simple as an email to the 14 of us this affected saying what had happened, what AHN was doing to fix it, this is what you need to do in the meantime. Instead, we had to get the information third hand.

We were told (again, secondhand) that WE needed to provide a copy of the bounced check AND a check number to our accounting department and that a check would be re-issued and all NSF fees incurred against our account would also be reimbursed. We were specifically told NOT to re-deposit the bounced check and we would be getting one in the mail.

I got an email two days later from an Evelyn Saywell in the accounting department stating that checks had been re-issued. This was late July. I'm still waiting on it to get to my door. I went ahead an re-deposited the check about two weeks later after getting tired of waiting and the lack of communication or guidance from Mr Brown about the matter. I did confirm with the AHN bank that funds were available before I re-deposited the bounced check with my bank.

We were also told AHN accounts had been frozen by the police investigating the matter. When I received my next check, I again called the AHN bank to verify funds were there to cover it. I noticed that the account numbers on this check were the same as on the one that had bounced. I thought that if an account had been frozen, you could no longer deposit or withdraw funds from it. Seemed very strange, and the person from the bank told me the same thing.

I then asked Mr. Brown for a copy of the police report about the investigation into the fradulent check matter so that my bank would again accept checks from the AHN financial institution. He told me he would send me a copy. I'm still waiting for that as well.

I did go back to work for AHN four days after the initial fiasco when things seemed to be settling down, though I still had an extremely uneasy feeling.

Mr. Brown sent out an email a few days after the dust had settled saying that a reorganization was in the works in the sports department and we would all be getting cut back as a result. Seems he lost a lot of clients because of the lack of content for my work stoppage. Too bad.

I was reduced to a 20 hour week (from full-time, 40 hours) and had to adjust my schedule to work day shifts (I had been the night editor). I also stay at home with my children during the day, so this proved to be a burden for a few days.

Then it happened again. The check I got for the first two weeks of August also bounced, and once again I found out about a week after the fact. I racked up $105 dollars in NSF fees this time around, and was lied to blatantly by Mr. Brown when I confronted him with it.

He told me he would need me to re-deposit and that he would clear this up Monday as the AHN Bank's customer service department didn't work on Saturdays (the day I found this out)

Coincidentally, I was on the phone with one of their reps as I was having an online chat with Mr. Brown and she was telling me there weren't sufficient funds in the account. I called him on it, and he abruptly signed off.

That is when I made up my mind I would not type another sylabble for him or for AHN.

Now, Jeff Brown won't respond to any phone calls or emails from me.

AHN still owes me for work I performed from August 16th-August 31st as well as $180 in NSF fees. I have submitted the timesheet on three different occastions now as well as the expense form with documentation for the bank charges. All total, they owe me around $750.

It is such a shame it came to this. Not only myself, but the lead sports editor, another junior editor, and now a third junior sports editor, have all left the company since these shenanigans took place.

I have since learned that several writers in foreign countries employed by AHN have yet to be paid for their work, including staff from Canada and Australia. The Australian writers boycotted work for weeks for the same reasons as I.

The staff writer who covered soccer for us wasn't paid for two months when he first started, and I'm not sure he has been yet.

I'd like to warn any prospective journalist that a job with AHN is not worth your time, your effort, or your journalistic values. You can do better.

I would hope that any of the clients of AHN read this cancel their subscriptions to this "service"

Let's face it. AHN and Jeff Brown need to be hit where it matters most, folks.

In the pocketbook.

What goes around, comes around.

Marc P.

Winston-Salem, North Carolina

U.S.A.