Case Study: How Not to Respond

In November 2010, Cooks Source magazine lifted a story from a blogger’s post and put it into their magazine.¹ However, the blogger, Monica Gaudio, was never paid for authorizing the reprinting of her material. When she contacted Cooks Source, the magazine’s editor, Judith Griggs, allegedly responded and Monica Gaudio posted the editor’s response:

¹ Rob Pegoraro, “Cooks Source Magazine Masters New Recipe: How to Annoy the Internet,” Washington Post (November 4, 2010), http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2010/11/cooks_source_masters_new_recip.html.

Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic [sic] Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was “my bad” indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds sometimes forget to do these things. But honestly Monica, the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence [sic] and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than it was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me… ALWAYS for free!

This response by the magazine led to their Facebook Page and their reputation being attacked within a day in news stories, blogs, and Twitter posts, and even caused some attacks by hackers. Clearly, the magazine editor did not understand copyright laws and chose to respond without consideration to the effort that went into the original work. Advertisers pulled out as well, which directly affected the magazine’s financial bottom line. The end result was that the magazine went out of business! If you do a Google search, all you get are articles on all the negative things about the magazine and the incident. Even if the magazine stayed in business, how long could you last if the first page on Google contains only negative stories?