Stunning Editorial Incompetence

7 November 2010

What happens when you steal a medieval recipe for apple pie from a web site and publish it in a magazine and on Facebook, and then when the original author points out the theft you send her a snarky email?

The results are not pretty.

That’s exactly what Cook’s Source did. The magazine, which evidently is distributed for free in print and on Facebook, but accepts advertisements and does generate income, lifted an article and recipe by Monica Gaudio on medieval apple pies from the Gode Cookery website and republished it in their magazine and Facebook page.

When Ms. Gaudio discovered the theft, she contacted the magazine and after an exchange of emails in which she determined the magazine lifted the article directly from the Gode Cookery website, and not from some free database of recipes, and asked that a $130 donation be made to the Columbia School of Journalism in lieu of payment for the article, Ms. Gaudio received this reply from Cook’s Source editor Judith Briggs:

“Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic 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 somethings 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 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 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!”

See Ms. Gaudio’s blog here in which she discusses the violation and posts the email.

I’ll leave it to the reader to form an opinion about the arrogance displayed in this email—as well as the editorial errors in Ms. Briggs’s email. But clearly Ms. Briggs doesn’t know about copyright laws. If she did, she would know that the web is not public domain. And the editing she did? Because the article has been partially taken down from the Facebook site, I can’t determine exactly what was changed, but from accounts of others I glean that all that Cook’s Source did was modernize some of the medieval spellings. (The end of the article is still up on Facebook as of this writing, showing that Cook’s Source is as incompetent at hiding their tracks as they are at the basics of professional editing and publishing.)

But the story gets better.

Not only is the Cook’s Source Facebook page swamped with a torrent of comments by outraged Facebookers, but some began to check the sources of other Cook’s Source articles. It seems that a large number of the recipes and articles in the magazine are “lifted” straight from the web, often without any kind of attribution. (Evidently, Ms. Gaudio was lucky to have her name put on the piece when Cook’s Source reprinted it.) One enterprising individual went so far as to compile a spreadsheet of 160 of these plagiarized articles.

All this has transpired over just four days since Ms. Gaudio made mention of it on her blog. Given that many of the stolen articles are from major media outlets with scads of lawyers on their payrolls, I think that Cook’s Source is not long for this world. Good riddance. We can only hope that Ms. Briggs doesn’t work in a professional editorial capacity ever again.

(Hat tip to Pharyngula—I’d post a link, but Science Blogs seems to be down at the moment.)

Video Friday Bonus: Grad School Follies

A couple videos about grad students. The first, while lacking production values, is to die for. Plus bonus points for use of the word “frak.”

And the Simpsons. Not as funny as the above video, but still pretty good.

(video unavailable)

Video Friday: Medieval Helpdesk

5 November 2010

This is an oldie, but for those who haven’t seen it:

(Hat tip: Jim Gorman for reminding me of its existence)

Who Is Jane Austen?

26 October 2010

Jane Austen has been in the news of late. An Oxford scholar has concluded from studying Austen’s manuscripts that the writer was much more an experimentalist than the printed versions of her books indicate and that unlike the popular image of her as a natural writer whose prose was perfect from the moment her pen touched paper, that her polished prose was actually the work of painstaking drudgery and multiple drafts. But as usual, the journalists miss the point.

In the Guardian article, the focus is on Austen’s “erratic” punctuation, her “eclectic” use of capital letters, and her “nonexistent” paragraph breaks, and gives the credit for the polished prose to her editor, William Gifford. The Daily Mail headline is, “How Jane Austen failed at spelling.” The BBC headline is, “Jane Austen’s style might not be here.” And a Baltimore Sun blog had, “Jane Austen would have flunked English?” The Chronicle of Higher Education has a much better story, as one might expect, that focuses on the manuscripts showing Austen to be much more of an experimentalist and ahead of her time, almost modernist in style, until reined in by her editor’s more conventional approach.

The finding is interesting for Austen scholars, but hardly newsworthy. The “dirty secret” of literary studies is that such findings are true for every writer, and one of the big questions for literary scholars is which version of a text is the one to examine. If newspapers get in a flurry over Austen, they would have a heart attack over Shakespeare. Take this for example:

To be, or not to be, I there’s the point,
To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I, all:
No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes,
For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,
And borne before an everlasting Iudge,
From whence no passenger ever retur’nd,
The undiscovered country, at whose sight
The happy smile, and the accursed damn’d.
But for this, the ioyfull hope of this,
Whol’d beare the scornes and flattery of the world,
Scorned by the right rich, the rich curssed of the poore?

This soliloquy, which seems familiar but definitely off, is actually the oldest known version of Hamlet’s famous speech. It’s from the First Quarto, also known as the “Bad Quarto,” published in 1603. It is generally believed to be constructed by memory from one of the actors in Shakespeare’s company, probably from a shorter version of the play used for provincial touring. The Second Quarto, published a year later is used as the basis for the play as we know it today. In the case of Hamlet, it is easy to discard the First Quarto as lacking authorial authority (actually, it’s not completely discarded as it does offers some interesting insights, especially in its more detailed stage directions), but the same situation obtains for nearly all of Shakespeare’s plays, with early quartos of varying degrees of authority in circulation. While many of his plays were published in his lifetime, there is no evidence that Shakespeare was involved in the publication of any of them. We don’t know how much of these texts are actually Shakespeare, and how much are the work of actors, editors, and printers.

Or take the case of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was a notoriously bad speller and relied heavily on his editor at Scribner’s to fix his texts. Here are the final lines of 1925 first edition of The Great Gatsby, some of the most famous words in twentieth century American literature:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther...And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Or are they? Here is what is written in Fitzgerald’s manuscript:

He believed in the green glimmer, in the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then but never mind—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. And one fine morning—

So we beat on, a boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Somewhere in the process, a period was changed to an ellipsis, “he” to “Gatsby,” “glimmer” to “light,” “boat” to “boats,” and most significantly, “orgastic” to “orgiastic.” Since the page proofs do not survive, we have no record of how Fitzgerald and his editors made these changes. Is orgastic, a rare word meaning “resembling orgasm,” what Fitzgerald originally intended? Or is it one of his many spelling errors and he meant orgiastic, meaning “relating to orgies; marked by excitement, extravagence, licentiousness”? Which one you choose has profound implications for the meaning of the passage.

And not only is there a question of “what is the authentic text?” There is also the question of “what is an author?” Jane Austen was a historical woman who lived from 1775–1817, but “Jane Austen” the author is not really the same person. She is a combination of that historical woman and her editors, publishers, and printers. Ditto for the playwright “Shakespeare.” (I’m not talking about nonsense like Bacon actually wrote the plays. There is no real doubt that the man from Stratford did the writing, but the versions that come down to us today do so with revisions by many others.) The “Julius Caesar” who wrote the Gallic Wars is actually the creation of a number of medieval scribes who penned the surviving manuscripts a millennium after the historical Julius was gutted on the floor of the Senate. And “Homer” is almost certainly as fictional as the gods and heroes “he” wrote about.

This would have made a much more interesting story than “Jane Austen couldn’t spell.”