Another freelancer alleges “idea appropriation” by The Walrus

During the past year, management at The Walrus magazine has been accused of poor treatment of staff and freelancers. This month, another freelance writer has come to Story Board with new allegations.

Ontario writer Ann Silversides told Story Board that she pitched a story about a new business to The Walrus last July. The magazine told her that her pitch overlapped with a story they had already scheduled for an upcoming issue.

Several months later, Silversides, a former reporter with The Globe and Mail, discovered that the exact same small business she had pitched – a biocremation facility in the town of Smiths Falls, Ontario – was the focus of The Walrus’s February cover story.

“Their message back to me said there were overlaps, and I thought: ‘Oh, they’re doing something about green cremations.’ You know there’s a big deal these days about burying people in shrouds and under trees and this kind of stuff,” Silversides told Story Board during a recent phone call.

“And that was why I was so angry when I saw their cover story. Because it wasn’t about overall green cremations. It was about biocremation and specifically this place in Smiths Falls,” she said. “I didn’t pitch a topic. I pitched something very, very specific. And that was very, very specifically what The Walrus cover story was about.”

The biocremation facility, said Silversides, who lives approximately 20 kilometres from Smiths Falls, had seen hardly any media coverage at that point, only a few small pieces in local newspapers.

“It all feels very mucky to me. My first thought was just ‘What do they think, I’m just a rube because I live in the country and so they can do what they want with my pitch?’ I don’t know what happened, but that certainly occurred to me,” she said.

When she saw The Walrus’s February cover story, Silversides sent a letter to editor-in-chief Jonathan Kay and received a prompt email reply. Kay said that he would investigate the matter and that the magazine would pay her the fee she would have received for the finished article should he determine that the idea was stolen.

The Walrus’s response

Approximately two weeks later, on June 2, Silversides received an email from Walrus publisher Shelley Ambrose. Ambrose told Silversides that she had spoken to current and former editorial staff, including the editor-in-chief, as well as the author of the story in question – former Walrus managing editor Graeme Bayliss, who resigned from the magazine in mid-May for health reasons.

Ambrose said she had looked at research timelines and, although Bayliss did not do interviews or write the story until much later, he had pitched it in June 2015 to then-managing editor, Kyle Wyatt, a month before Silversides’ pitch arrived. She said she had seen dated Google records of research he had done even earlier to pitch the story internally.

Ambrose went on to say that The Walrus’s communication with Silversides had been “woefully inadequate.” The editor who read the pitch, she said, should have called or written to tell her exactly what was on the schedule and either involved Silversides or assigned her the story. However, managing editor Kyle Wyatt had decided to proceed with the story as planned.

“It’s interesting to me that she says the story perhaps should have been assigned to me. I mean if [Bayliss] has proposed something and done all this research, why would they assign it to me?” said Silversides.

Following this email from Shelley Ambrose, Silversides requested proof – in the form of time-stamped emails or pitch records – that Bayliss had submitted his pitch before hers. She has not received a reply.

Neither Shelley Ambrose nor Jonathan Kay has responded to Story Board’s requests for comment. Graeme Bayliss has also not replied to emails from Story Board.

A warning to freelancers

Silversides wants to warn other freelancers about her experience with The Walrus.

“More than anything, the reason I would go public with this…is to tell freelancers to be really, really careful,” she said.

Silversides is also upset about the magazine’s communication style. The response to her initial pitch, she said, came from the general pitch email address and was signed “The Editorial Staff.”

“I think it’s appalling that you get a message from ‘the editorial staff.’ I don’t know anywhere else where you get a ‘the editorial staff’ reply instead of from a person. If I’d known who’d replied to me, I could have gotten back to them,” she said.

She would like the magazine to either show her proof that they were pursuing her story before she pitched it, or to pay her the fee she would have been paid for writing the piece.

Last fall, Toronto freelance writer Alex Gillis went public with a story similar to Silversides’. He had successfully pitched and written two drafts of a story for The Walrus about academic cheating in Canadian universities before having it killed with little explanation.

Gillis received assurance from then-managing editor Kyle Wyatt that the magazine would not be publishing a similar story in the near future. Six weeks later, a story about academic cheating, written by Kyle Wyatt, appeared on the magazine’s cover.

Story Board contacted Gillis about these latest developments. Gillis said that after he went public with his story, a number of other writers contacted him about problems they’d had with The Walrus, one of whom also claimed idea appropriation. That writer said they complained to The Walrus’s management after Gillis went public and was compensated fully for the use of their idea.

“The pattern of killing and stealing writers’ ideas is reprehensible, because it plays on writers’ insecurities and exploits them financially and emotionally,” said Gillis via email.

Gillis said that having a major story killed – an experience he’s had only a few times during his 20 years in journalism – is devastating.

“A decent, ethical editor would be gentle about the killing and walk away. The Walrus was brutal, though. As one writer told me, she felt like she wasn’t ‘important,’” he said.

Comments from the Canadian Writers Group

Literary agent Derek Finkle of the Canadian Writers Group has been in contact with both Gillis and Silversides about their problems with The Walrus. Finkle does not represent either writer, but he takes an interest in matters regarding freelancers and contractual obligations.

Finkle was contacted by Jonathan Kay last fall when Gillis’s story first went public. Kay was responding to concerns Finkle had expressed to the Toronto Freelance Editors and Writers’ group list about The Walrus’s contract, which has a kill fee clause allowing the magazine to kill a story for any reason and pay the writer 50% of the agreed-upon fee.

The Walrus recently revamped their freelance agreement. Story Board will be addressing the new contract in another post later this week.

As for Ann Silversides’ pitch, Finkle said that it is conceivable that the magazine had already heard about the Smiths Falls biocremation facility before they received it. But if so, he said, the magazine should offer proof.

“Given the circumstances and the specificity of the pitch and that the story basically hinged on that very business, I think that The Walrus is in a position to have to provide proof that they had this first. And they have a system, apparently, that tracks pitches and it time stamps. They can’t just say ‘Hey, we’re The Walrus, we didn’t do this.’ They need to show that that was the case,” he said.

Finkle said that he considers appropriating ideas pitched by freelancers to be a form of plagiarism. Although an idea cannot be copyrighted, taking freelance pitches and assigning them to in-house writers deprives freelance writers of the intellectual credit and financial compensation they deserve, he said.

“I feel like The Walrus has always set itself up as being there in the service of Canadian writers,” he said. “But in my dealings with them over the years, I’ve come away on several occasions with the distinct feeling that they believe it’s actually the other way around.”

*This post has been updated to accurately reflect the circumstances surrounding Graeme Bayliss’s resignation from The Walrus.