From: Kevin Carter kcarter@mydamnchannel.com
To: Mike Anderson pickeringonline@sbcglobal.net
Sent: Fri, December 11, 2009 1:23:47 AM
Subject: Re: Unattributed material on your blog
Hey Mike...
The letter I sent you was clearly not intended for print... it written as a business-to-business communication from one professional to another merely to let you know who actually wrote the piece you posted, if, in fact, it was sent to you blindly by some third party.
A simple attribution to RAMP was all that I requested. I would appreciate it if you took it down immediately.
Oh, and thanks for subscribing.
Kevin Carter
My response:
Kevin:
If you had wanted a simple attribution, you would have simply asked for it and I would have simply provided it. I'm not a difficult guy to get along with.
You wouldn't have done the dog and pony show, bringing your veiled threat of legal action into play, along with this demand: We fully expect you to immediately update your blog to include the proper credit to RAMP.
I honestly had never heard of RAMP before yesterday morning, when you first contacted me. I'm told that you have an R&R background, so this attitude from you doesn't surprise me.
If you had wanted the letter to be unpublished, you should have said so. In the forty years of my radio experience, in the twenty-one years I've been online and in the ten years I've published STLMedia.net, I have always -- always -- credited and sourced material, unless the provider asked for anonymity. It has never been a secret that any emails to me are all grist for the online mill, unless otherwise specified by the sender. No correspondent has ever had a problem with that policy before.
For what it's worth, I've had several long and not particularly nice discussions with our local newspaper regarding their purloining my work without credit..."Oh," the writer told me, "we never credit blogs!" So I'm particularly sensitive to the whole "giving credit" issue.
And your implication that I may or may not have gotten the ad from a third party is an insult. I told you exactly how it came to me. For all the years I've put into STLMedia.net, I've posted openings as often as possible. This was a job opening in a market with a lot of unemployed radio types hungry to get a few bucks in their wallet. Honestly, who cares who wrote the freakin' ad if it leads someone to the gig?
You got your credit for the help-wanted ad. Now here's what needs to happen: you ignore STLMedia.net and I'll ignore RAMP. That's a fair and equitable disposition of it all.
Mike Anderson
Editor/Publisher, STLMedia.net
