Dear readers,
First of all, I’m sorry about my delay on sending you this update. For the last few weeks I’ve been on multiple planes traveling around the world, connecting with and interviewing architects in an attempt to give you, our readers, all of the latest projects and insights in the architecture world. From San Francisco to Arkansas, New York, London and Basel, in just a few days.
On September 18th, we featured a story titled “Harlem’s New Renaissance”. The article was taken from Jenna McKnight’s article “Harlem’s New Renaissance” featured on Arch Record on August 25th. ArchDaily’s article written by Irina Vinnitskaya took the ideas proposed by Jenna and several of the quotes and information she used, accompanied by a link back to Architectural Record and photography credits, but failed to properly credit the person who came up with the original story idea, Jenna McKnight. Our mistake, a big one.
When Jenna noticed this (as Arch Record constantly reviews our content to syndicate it on their website and on their daily newsletter) she was very upset and contacted me immediately, but given my low email access due to travelling I saw the note a few hours later rather than instantaneously. Immediately upon receiving the email and noticing the improper crediting, I took down the article redirecting it back to Arch Record. In the meanwhile, Jenna posted a story on Arch Record stating that we plagiarized her story with all the given facts.
I reached out to Jenna, told her that there had been no bad intentions and gave her my apologizes as ArchDaily’s editor in chief and assumed my responsibility. Jenna replied, and she was ok with my apologies.
After that, a few blogs picked up on Jenna’s blog post and called this a “blog wars”, trying to add more fuel to the fire. Sadly none of them even asked us our side of the story, except for Sydney at StinkyJournalism.
Our mission at ArchDaily is to provide knowledge to architects around the world, and we will continue bringing you our highest quality of original content, along with information from other respected and useful sources we think will add value to our readers, always sticking to the best practices of fair use.
I hope that this doesn’t affect our relation with Arch Record, as we are both voices of the architecture world. As I mentioned before, Arch Record syndicates our content on their site and includes links on their newsletter (pointing to their site, not ours) citing ArchDaily as the source (but not crediting the specific author, failing to provide a byline). They stopped doing this as of last week.
Dear readers, our commitment is to every architect around the world. Rest assured that the passionate team of architects here at ArchDaily will do their best efforts to keep serving you, as you continue improving our world’s built environment.
- David Basulto
