New York Times Uses 100 Interviews Without Linking Back. And Then We Work It Out.
In May, I wrote a piece on 100 Interviews about a couple in Staten Island, Amanda Curtis and Brendan Coyle, who run an art gallery out of their apartment.
Last week, Brendan Facebook-ed me to say that a reporter for the New York Times reached out to them about doing a piece. I thought it was cool. They deserve the recognition. In the message he wrote, “when she came to interview us she asked about your interview and said she was using it as a background reference on us to get aquainted(sic) with our story.” That worried me.
The Times piece came out on Sunday (ironically, the same day I had a small interview in the Times Magazine). The reporter didn’t plagiarize and I’m sure she got all the information from Brendan and Amanda directly but reading the piece, it didn’t sit right with me. The structure was exactly like mine, with no mention of 100 Interviews.
See: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/realestate/what-the-ravens-wrought-habitatstompkinsville-si.html
This is the email I sent to the Times in full:
#39. BRENDAN COYLE & AMANDA CURTIS - “Museum curators.”
Photo by: Elyssa Maxx
When Amanda Curtis first moved to Staten Island as a high schooler, she experienced a bit of a culture shock.
Before her mother, an eccentric, flighty artist, moved them, Amanda had grown up with her grandparents in an old-fashioned bed and breakfast in Maine that she affectionately calls “the inn.” Because of the inn’s theme, Amanda was dressed in Victorian clothing for most of her adolescence. Her childhood turned the already-creative Amanda into an eccentric and artistic teenager.
“All I knew was living with 80 year olds,” she laughs.
But then, Amanda’s stepfather got in to medical school on the island and so Amanda was sent to the local public high school. Where she’d come from, her school had had art classes of all different kinds. Students were encouraged to choose a medium they felt suited them best.
But at her new school in Staten Island, there was no art program or art classes. Amanda felt trapped. With no way to follow her passion sanctioned by school hours, she searched for other outlets.
“I’d cut class with the theatre group kids and we’d lay in the fields or rub paint on each other,” she says. “There was nothing else to express it.”
Her boyfriend, Brendan Coyle snorts beside her. “Classic Staten Island,” he says, shaking his head.
#46. EMILIO SPARKS - “Someone with a radio show.”
It’s nearing midnight and Emilio Sparks is interviewing a Harlem rapper named Den10, a clean-cut young guy in a sweatshirt with his own name on it. Once on-air, Emilio launches into an in-depth discussion of Mr. 10’s marijuana-smoking habits.
“How old were you when you started?” “What kind of blunts do you roll?” “What do you like to do when you get high?” The rapper laughs and dutifully answers the questions, and the direct approach gets Emilio a more interesting interview than, let’s say, asking about the music, would have yielded.
“You just want to ask what other people don’t have the balls to ask,” he says when I question his choice of topic. “I just want to one-up everybody.”
