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VegNews pisses off vegans everywhere
Thanks to a mouse at wank_report for this!

VegNews is "an award-winning vegan magazine and website packed with recipes, travel, news, food, reviews, and so much more."

"So much more" apparently means stock photos of meat used to illustrate vegan recipes. Comments are posted, comments are deleted, and users are banned when they point out that using photos of meat (some of them poorly photoshopped to remove bones) seems contrary to the tenets of the magazine.

“Thank you for your interest in VegNews. However, your inappropriate and mean-spirited commenting has violated the policy of VegNews, and we have and will continue to remove any future comments. Please know that we welcome constructive criticism from all viewpoints, and rarely unpublish comments from readers. Should you have any constructive feedback, feel free to email me directly. I’d love to hear from you.”

People are extremely not happy. (But their wanking is done in the most non-violent, humane way possible.)

VegNews posts a non-apology. Surprise, surprise, it doesn't go over well.

(Gothamist's closing line about this debacle is priceless: "Should VegNews change its name to CarnNews, was their apology enough, or is this all just much tofu about nothing?")

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innocentsmith
2011-04-16 09:51 pm UTC (link)

That site's graphics are stock-photo-o-rama. My guess is, they don't actually test the recipes themselves, they just aggregate content from other sources. And quite often there's no picture attached to an article, or there is but it's unusable because of lighting or irrelevance* or just looking nasty, so the content manager or whoever's in charge of such things has to go through stock photo sites looking for something that vaguely resembles how they think the food's supposed to look. It can be a little frustrating.

And you know, fair enough: not every multi-topic magazine or website can afford to have an in-house test kitchen and food photographer, or to pay food writers to generate entirely new content just for them. Not every small town newspaper can afford to have a foreign correspondent, but they still need to report on world news.

It was stupid as hell to try to photoshop meat into vegan food, and they were bound to be caught at it, but I do kind of get it. Where these guys went really wrong was with the snotty response to a legitimate complaint.

* Man, if I had a dime for every time recipe articles were, like, "Whole Grain Banana Pancakes with Whipped Cream and Bourbon-Maple-
Pecan Syrup" and the attached pic was a drawing of a sheaf of wheat. Argh.

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