Quartz
Quartz added credit to a New York Times-made graphic it featured in its list of great charts of 2012, defusing a request from the paper’s legal department to remove the graphic.
“The issue in the Quartz piece as it was originally published was that they did not mention The Times as the source of the graphic in the write-up (although they did link to our site),” Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy tells Poynter in an email.
Quartz notes, correctly, that the same graphic was featured on Poynter.org, which did credit the Times. Both publications featured screenshots of the original chart, which is interactive.
“We’re proud of our graphics and while we are thrilled to have been included in this round-up of the best, we simply were asking for proper attribution,” Murphy says.
The Times’ didn’t originally offer better attribution as a remedy, though: “we hereby demand that you immediately remove the graphic from qz.com and cease and desist from any further use of any New York Times content in any manner whatsoever,” Deborah Beshaw-Farrell wrote in the letter to Quartz.
The Times also complained successfully to Twitter about the parody account The Times Is On It in November. Account author Benjamin Kabak changed the account’s avatar, which cleared things up.
Related: 5 things journalists should know about Quartz, Atlantic Media’s business news startup | Quartz’s practice of ‘linking out’ renews attention to aggregation debate
