Lily Allen give NYT an interview, and they send a photog out to take some snaps with her in her home. Those snaps get sold to tabloid rag OK! magazine, who touts them as “World Exclusive, At home with Lily Allen”. It’s actually fairly common practice, but a bit below NYT in my opinion, and Lily’s too.
She posted a blog about it today- and it’s pretty well argued as well. No random asides in this post, just the facts from her point of view. She closes with: “The world has become a dark place when The New York Times considers OK magazine to be ‘the news business’. Sorry if that made for tedious reading but, I think the NYT have behaved really badly and I wanted to vent .”
Read the full post at her myspace blog
honeyrose
on Feb 28th, 2009
@ 11:52 am:
Lily’s point is that she made an exception to invite the NYT photographer into her home, which I think is different to being out on the town. Also she does not do interviews with the “celebrity trivia” media and agreed to the NYT because it was a serious newspaper and to accompany the interview agreed to exclusive photo shoot for the NYT.
The NYT then sold the photos which were reused to accompany a fake interview in OK magazine. Her PR agency claims the NYT never does this – sell on exclusive photos. The NYT claims it does this (sells the results of an exclusive photo shoot) all the time as it needs the money and send Allen a snotty email telling her to p–s off.
They all come out of it badly, Allen for being naive, the PR agency for not protecting her interests (strikes me agency is being less than truthful, it slipped up basically.)
But I think the NYT will come off worst, as any celeb who now agrees to an interview with them will demand rights to the photos taken. They will lose money from other syndications as a result. They should have written a more apologetic letter not the snotty one they sent. Bad mistake.