Pay your writers, or else! Signed: the internet.

Thursday afternoon, users on Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal and reporters from the mainstream media joined forces to expose a miscreant editor and restore justice in the blogosophere. 

When Monica Gaudio, a food blogger who specializes in medieval cuisine, realized that a magazine had published her 1,300-word feature on apple pie without her permission, she wrote about it on her LiveJournal page and included her email exchange with Judith Griggs, the editor of Cooks Source magazine.

In the email, Griggs tells Gaudio that the internet is public
domain and that, frankly, the original article was lousy and that she
should be compensated for all the copy-editing she had to do. Tsk, tsk. Talk about ungrateful. 

The story wound up on Reddit, and Facebook, and Twitter — the usual suspects. An enraged commentariat did some sleuthing and found that, in addition to stealing copy from small-time bloggers, Griggs stole from people with full-time lawyers: Martha Stewart, Paula Deen and NPR to name a few. Not only have her advertisers pulled out (publicly, on Facebook), Griggs probably has FoodNetwork lawyers on her trail, who are, according to sources, very expensive.

Coverage by The Guardian, The L.A. Times, CNN, Mediabistro and the CBC has blasted Cooks Source from obscurity.

The Sydney Morning Herald has audio of Gaudio telling her tale and Edward Champion has a good chronicle of the story on his blog.

On Friday, Cooks Source was one of the top trended items on Twitter and at publishing time the magazine’s Facebook page was hot.

The apostrophe in Cooks remains at large.