Staten Island is the only borough of New York with its own daily newspaper. The Staten Island Advance, owned by Si Newhouse, is part of the media empire that includes Condé Nast, Fairchild and newspapers like the New Jersey Star-Ledger, the New Orleans Time Picayune and the Portland Oregonian. On Staten Island, sales of the Advance routinely trounce those of the Post, Daily News and Times. Given Staten Island's population of nearly 450,000, that's a lot of newspapers. All this is to say that, despite New York media's aversion to the fifth borough, the Advance matters to a lot of people.

So what was the Advance doing when they stole a story from the New York Post... a story that happened on their own turf?

On Monday, December 17 the Post reported on a Staten Island resident who spent a week in Rikers Island for wearing a Yankees jacket. Cops arrested 35-year-old Benjamin Soto, a custodian at a YMCA, while on the lookout for a young man in a Yankees jacket who had robbed a teenager at knifepoint. Soto could not make the $25,000 bail and spent a week in Rikers... Just for preferring the Yanks to the Mets.

Then the Staten Island Advance reported the story three days later and referred to the Post story as a "published report." The Advance's piece was a direct rewrite of the Post story, even to the point of including the same quote that Soto gave the other paper. All well and good... except the story happened on their turf, in a police precinct that reports their arrests directly to the Advance.