She had seen the haunted house-styled confection before, she thought, in a previous issue of a Martha Stewart publication. So Ms. Findley, an avid follower of all things Martha who regularly buys the special Halloween magazines, checked the October 2008 issue of Martha Stewart Living and found the same image.
“That shocked me,” said Ms. Findley, an associate professor of humanities at Vermont Technical College in Randolph Center. “I’ve been an editor, I’ve been a reporter. You just don’t do that.”
The similarities didn’t end at the cake stand. Ms. Findley said she spent the next two and half hours scouring the issues looking for examples of duplicated content and found “another one, and another one and another one.”
“By the time I got to five, I was floored,” she said.
What Ms. Findley stumbled upon was the common publishing practice of repurposing content, something that legions of magazines and newspapers — including The New York Times — do for special issues or sections. But those issues usually state clearly that they contain previously published material.
Finding no such label on this year’s Halloween issue — in which Ms. Stewart says that her food editors are “at it again, dreaming up truly original drinks, snacks and desserts that only look gruesome” — Ms. Findley took to cataloging the similarities.
Victor S. Navasky, a journalism professor, the director of the Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism at Columbia University and the chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review, said it was not unusual for magazines to reprint images or even articles. The problem, Mr. Navasky said, is if the publication does not tell the reader that is has done so.
“At some point, it becomes unfair to the reader because the consumer is buying for a second time what he thought was original material,” Mr. Navasky said. “The problem isn’t the repurposing, the problem is the lack of notice for the reader.”
In an e-mail, a spokeswoman for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia said the company stood by its work and how it was delivered to readers. Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia publishes two to four special issues a year, which each carry about 60 percent original material and 40 percent repurposed material, a company spokesman said. In the 2011 Halloween issue, about 70 percent of the content was original.
Ms. Findley said she had sent multiple e-mails and made a handful of phone calls to the company asking for a response to her complaint about the use of repurposed content. After a reporter inquired, the company issued an apology to Ms. Findley stating: “We appreciate Ms. Findley’s passion for our content and apologize for falling short in the way we communicated with her on this matter.”
The day after the company released that statement, Ms. Findley received an e-mail from Ms. Stewart and the two women then spoke on the phone for about 30 minutes that Saturday afternoon. Ms. Findley described Ms. Stewart as “incredibly apologetic,” and “a very nice lady,” but was still disappointed to find out that the special issues contain republished material.
“I told her, ‘You’re Martha Stewart, you don’t follow that standard, you set it,’ ” Ms. Findley said.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=1975b94c0aa5a5fe1c03412982344dca
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