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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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pfeffermuse
2011-04-18 02:03 am UTC (link)

Having worked in magazine publishing, the use of stock photos doesn't really bother me. For the most part, most "foods" photographed for publication are non-edible, whether or not they're vegan.

As recipes are not subject to the same copyright restrictions as other published text, I'm wondering more if VegNews has been veering down the same path as Cooks Source. While I doubt they're plagiarising, they're probably "adapting" meat, pescetarian and vegetarian recipes into vegan ones, and using the stock photos to save on purchase and preparation costs for the food, as well as not having to pay a cooking and/or photo staff.

And depending on how they've contracted their print-publishing run, they may be offsetting some of that cost by piggybacking with another smaller-run magazine, which might cover anything from hair-dressing to hare-dressing.

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