Just less than week after our April 28th blog item “Bad Girls or Just Bad Taste” (see lower down on this blog) critical of Amy Spindler’s editorial on message t-shirts called ‘What’s Your Sign” in which we stated our opinion that she was walking a thin line between cutting edge fashion editorial and child pornography, we heard from her lawyer – that is in a letter from the New York Times Assistant General Counsel George Freeman.
Amy claims that she have been receiving our newsletter without ever subscribing to it! God the horror of it! She was, in fact, added to our e-mailing list over a year ago after we e-mailed a complaint to her about our ‘What’s Black & White and Available All Over?’ market report appearing, in our opinion, to have been used for more than just the basis of a NY Times Magazine article of almost the same name. After a most rude e-mail response by her to our complaint we kept her on our list. We have no record of her ever requesting to be deleted from our mailing lists. Indeed she has been receiving our newsletters and updates and never once in the last few months (at least) has she requested or simply used the link provided to unsubscribe. Only days after we wrote the article did we then hear not from her, she must have been too busy or something, but rather the NY Times lawyer!
Of course this is not the first time on this blog readers have heard the word “harassment” used as a defense when it comes to someone who hears or receives some critical comment about their work and does not like it and is unwilling or unable to address the issue. In fact the lawyer even referred to our reports “adorned with uncomplimentary comments about her” in his letter. Amy is another one who confuses who she is with who she works for. We are critical of her work as editor of the The New York Times Sunday Magazine Fashion section and care less than nothing about her personally.
For the record there are those who think that Amy Spindler is doing a lousy job as Style Editor of the Sunday New York Times Magazine. I am among them and will continue to criticize her work when warranted and remain convinced that she should be canned. We are not going to be threatened by The New York Times or their lawyers when it come to the right to express our opinion about one of their editor’s professional judgement or quality of their work.
Although many in the industry agree with us privately few are willing to say so publicly. They are afraid of what might happen. On the other hand, we have no such fears. So we have removed Amy from our mailing lists, but our log files indicate daily accesses from the nytimes.com domain so we are pretty sure she is still reading us. So much for freedom of the press Amy! And another reason why we think it is time for Amy to move on to another work experience.
