It was revealed today on QuarryGirl that VegNews has been using stock photos (which may or may not be vegan) in their magazine and website, outraging many in the vegan community. I am not one of those people and this may be a very unpopular opinion, but I don’t really give a crap that they use stock photos.
I have seen countless tweets today where people have said that they will no longer buy the magazine because of this. SERIOUSLY!!! The fact that people are even shocked that stock photos are being used is comical. Do you know how expensive it is to run a magazine? Especially one that is a fringe magazine with a limited subscription base. For VegNews to make, and take a photo of every recipe would get very costly and ultimately the consumer would end up footing the bill. Yes, when it comes to recipes it would be nice to see what the end result actually looks like. When I wrote my cookbooks, Are You Sure That’s Vegan, it was important for me to have photos of every recipe. Luckily for me, my husband is a great photographer and I made all the recipes and he photographed everything. However, if I didn’t have access to a photographer it would have been very tempting to just go to a stock photography site, spend a few bucks and grab some photos. So I understand why VegNews feels the need to use stock photos.
On the point that the stock photos are actually of food that isn’t vegan, well, that does suck but unfortunately there are a limited number of vegan food photos on stock photography sites. I’m not saying what they are doing is right, but I do know that if VegNews had to raise it’s price to say $10, so that they could hire an in house photographer, many of those same people complaining about stock photos would stop buying the magazine because then they’d complain it was too expensive.
VegNews is a great magazine that provides a lot of very informative content and I for one will continue to read it.
P.S. Just as I finished writing this I noticed that VegNews has posted a letter to it’s readers explaining their position. I think you should take what they say to heart before you go boycotting their magazine. We vegans boycott enough, we don’t need to boycott each other.
http://vegnews.com/web/uploads/asset/3169/file/FromVegNews.pdf
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