Last week, we wrote about plagarism allegations leveled against The Advocate and Southern Voice. There’s been a positive development on the disagreement between The Advocate and University of Oklahoma student Ricky Maranon.
Thursday afternoon a friend of mine called me and told me that someone from The Advocate wanted to talk to me about Escape’s posting of my letter.
So after I finished with some class work, I called the number, and I spoke with an editor at The Advocate.
He said the fact that my story was not cited properly was an error made when the story was posted online, and he said the magazine had changed it that afternoon.
When I asked him why it took so long for my letter to get a response, I was told that whoever told me to send a letter instead of speaking to someone personally had made a mistake in how to handle complaints like mine.
He said the address that I sent my letter of concern to was a general use mailbox that is not only used by many people submitting stories, but content sent to that address is easily mixed up with other priorities of the magazine.
We continued to talk about how Oklahoma politics can be, and he wished EscapeOKC the best of luck. Before we hung up, I told him we would remove the original story from our website since the mistake had been corrected.
Good news all around.