Today, my good buddy and esteemed illustrative colleague Alex Eben Meyer got hit with the reality stick of what it’s like to be an illustrator in new media today.
It started when Alex was hired to do an illustration for Slate, for an article by Farhad Manjoo titled, “How Black People Use Twitter”, that appeared last week in the web magazine of note. I’ll leave the racial and other techno-sociological points for others to debate; Alex’s main goal was to create an image for the article that keyed into it, and for better or ill, he created this peppy little fella, his interpretation of the Twitter bird, but colored brown, and with a large oversized baseball cap, askew, with a hashtag on it.
We can debate honestly as to whether Alex’s drawing was appropriate (I hold that it’s fine), but the story takes a twist. NPR, upholding their long, noble tradition of being about 3 to 7 days behind the rest of the planet when it comes to everything important, then published a piece on their All Tech Considered blog by Sam Sanders; it was accompanied a short audio piece on the phenomenon cited in Manjoo’s piece, and the subsequent fall out.
Notice anything about that piece?
Alex’s name is mentioned nowhere in it.
One could debate the merit of including a discussion of the graphic element of it at all (blogger Alicia Nassardeen photoshopped Alex’s illustrations into a series of different ‘black stereotypes’). The issue brings up so many varied ideas wrapped up around race and technology that had the article ignored that graphic ground completely, it would be a fine piece. This is NPR, after all! Sober discussion! Rational thought! No time for cartoons!
But Sanders dives into that part headfirst, making sure he DOES mention all that stuff, and more: he features the parodies as an illustration for the post, he interviewes Alicia Nassardeen… shoot, he even interviewes a blogger about her opinion about the drawing that Alex did! But… nary a credit in sight.
I find this all incredibly weird, and I’m sure Sanders is a nice enough guy, suffering the time and work constraints that all us in the media world feel. But to consciously leave out such an essential part of the issue that he himself brought up in the first place isn’t some kind of bold journalistic statement. I dare say it’s just bad journalism, and what’s more, just kind of lazy. Would Sanders take a chunk of text, unattributed, and just hope no one noticed? I think not.
At the heart of it, of course, is my personal view that illustrators still don’t get the propers deserved to us (I see a bunch of ink stained fists rising behind me, now), and this is just one in a long line of slights. This is an issue that people who make things easily transferable to the web need to sit down and think about deeply; sometimes, I think we’ve already ceded the ground that we can make money doing it.
I have newspapers – real, live newspapers, that have print runs and stuff, emailing me every week to see if they can use an image they found of mine for free. Every week, no joke. And that’s just the ones who decide to call me. The age of solid rights usage as passed.
What we still have a line in the sand for is credits. Illustrators, it is our last stand. Demand credit, always. Follow up, heckle editors, harangue journalists who take you for granted. Make sure it always links back to you. Sometimes, I fear, it’s all we have left.
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