Matthew Pryce is a local graphic design artist who has developed quite a catalog of satirical images and designs over the years. Back in September when the whole Talk of the Sound – Patch Plagiarism kerfluffle was going on, Pryce sent along some images inspired by the incident. After having gotten a call from Patch Editor-in-Chief Brian Farnham admitting what his staff had denied for days — that they had, in fact, lifted an image from Talk of the Sound and attempted to pass it off as their own — we preferred to drop the matter and move on. Unfortunately, the folks at Patch keep bringing it up, most recently at the Online News Association conference in Washington, DC last month and then in a follow up interview in the Online Journalism Review.
In the interview, Farnham said things like “we’ve been called out I think because we’re a convenient target” and “I’m not excusing the incidents you cite” and then goes on to make excuses like the image was just a collage of mug shots and the editor did not do it on purpose but was just rushed and got sloppy.
I did not “call out” Patch because they were a “convenient target”, I called them out because they stole content from me, refused to remove it, did not respond to emails asking for credit or removal, issued TWO public statements calling me a liar for claiming the content was mine and made various defamatory remarks about my motives for “lying”. This went on for four days before Farnham called to admit what I already knew — that the image was mine. What is particularly irksome is that Farnam describes his response to another case of plagiarism in California where he says “we immediately apologized, corrected the record, and ended our relationship with the freelancer”. That stands in contrast to their response in New Rochelle, where they immediately went on the attack, never corrected the record and continue to employ the regional editor (the local editor was fired). To this day, they have never published any correction, retraction, or admission and have never apologized for or retracted the defamatory remarks or held anyone accountable for making them.
If they are not going to drop the matter then neither are we so we are going to go ahead and make available under our creative commons license the set of satirical Patch logos Matthew Pryce created with one exception. The world is free to copy, distribute, remix and transmit the work but you are not required to give attribution unless you so choose; Matthew added a watermark to the images but located in such a way that it can be cropped out of you like. You are welcome to alter, transform, or build upon this work. The only two caveats are that if you transform the logos into something else you may only distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one and you may not use this work for commercial purposes. We are offering the images for free and we do not want anyone else making money from them so you too have to offer them for free.
Matthew takes request so if you have an idea for a variation on this theme contact him via his Twitter account (@matthewfuntime). He is a “starving artist” so if you like his designs consider sending him some work.
Matthew loves Sports Talk Radio and loves to have fun with Mike Francesca who is sometimes referred to as “The Sports Pope”.
