Member-only story
When we are the content, who owns it?
When I opened my email, a Google alert for my name appeared. Normally, they’re notifications about soccer-playing teenagers with my name, and I swipe and delete. But the title on this one caught my attention, “NEWS: Woman on Stepmom.” Having recently written an article about my relationship with my stepmom, I figured the reprint I had granted another publication had finally posted and opened it to see the edits they made (they always change my pictures and clean up grammar).
To my surprise, my article was…not my article. It was a summary/interview hybrid of my article that a woman had posted on Newsbreak. I read with shock as she interjected a few narrative points, but 75% of the “article” were quotes from my piece.
“Okay,” I thought. “This is interesting.”
I scrolled to the bottom and instead of citing the story I posted on Medium as the source, she cited the reprint site with no indication that I was the author of the piece — merely the subject of an interview that never happened.
And then I saw the comments. Lots of them. Commenting on my story as if it were something she wrote about me.
By this point, my confusion had turned to anger and I barged into my husband’s office, waving my phone around. “What can I do about this?”
