By Joel Thurtell
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Odd situation I have with The New York Times, which wants to charge me a $520 fee for reprinting a story I wrote for them 30 years ago.
They only paid me seventy-five bucks for the story.
And they still owe me some beer money.
It began back in my freelancing days. When I sold my work, I was careful to make it clear that I was selling “one time rights only” to my stories. The story in dispute, about the proposal of some whacky Michiganders that their county of Cass in southwestern Michigan ought to secede and become part of Indiana, made for some fun writing. It was a preposterous notion, everybody knew it was simply a headline-grabber for a handful of would-be political opportunists. I sold versions of my yarn not only to The NY Times, but to The Detroit Free Press Magazine and Indianapolis Star Magazine.
I own the copyright to the text I sold to The Times.
That means I’m free to quote the entire story at length.
But for my journalism textbook, I want more: I want to reprint The Times article as it appeared in The Times.
Why?
Because it is a Times article. I want it to appear in my book exactly as it appeared when printed in The Times. It’s a neat story in is own right, but I want to show how it appeared in The Times. For an obscure writer literally working from a garret in Berrien Springs, Michigan, it was a real coup. The seventy-five bucks was nice, but the story under a Times head — that’s where the glory lay.
Times cachet. Real big city cred.
Or as much credibility as a no-byline NY Times story can lend.
They seem to be claiming that I should pay them for the appearance they created as well as the words I wrote.
I’m hoping they’ll relent and waive the fee, because the day will come when The Times, now on the skids and headed into the Dustbin of Journalism, will be glad I was kind enough to lend them MY cred by transferring my story from their dead pages into the living pages of my book on journalism.
If they don’t relent, but insist on charging me a fee, then I’ll omit that clip. Simple as that. They are not the be all and end all that they think they are.
Now here is the funny thing about this whole story: I got the assignment to write a story for The Times after their Detroit bureau reporters grabbed my research on another topic and produced a story under a staff byline, squeezing me out.
Michigan Indian fishing rights was a hot issue back in ’79. I’d done lots of research and I wrote a series for The South Bend Tribune. Later, I wrote a long story for The Detroit Free Press Magazine. I wrote an even more detailed story for The National Fisherman. And I wrote a long story for The Progressive.
Incidentally, The Progressive quite enthusiastically gave me permission to reprint my story from their September 1980 issue. The Indy Star approved my right to reprint my story in its pages. The Detroit Free Press gave me permission to reprint the whole darn story, too.
Anyway, there’s special background to the Cass County secession story, because it was a sop to me after I complained that the Detroit bureau guys ripped off my proposal that I write about Indian fishing rights for their august paper.
I made the mistake of sending a query letter on Indian fishing that contained too much information — enough for a reporter to head north and knock on doors without doing his own research. When The Times assigned its “curtain-raiser” to a staffer, I was mad as hops and shared my beef with The Times Detroit bureau chief.
He promised to assign future stories to me and persuaded me to photocopy the crucial judicial ruling in the fishing rights case and mail it to the Timesmen.
On June 4, 1979, the Times bureau chief sent me a note with a small check to cover my cost of photo-copying the judge’s ruling. He noted that a Times staff writer was on his way to interview people for an Indian fishing rights story with my articles and the court ruling “in hand.” Besides payment for the copies, the Times bureau chief wrote, “I’ll try to squeeze out a beer allowance to cover your other troubles.”
I never got that “beer allowance.”
Now they want to take it away.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com
