Post’s New ‘Gut Check’ Column Almost Lost Its Name Before It Even Hit the Streets
Washington Post Food Editor Joe Yonan sent an e-mail to Northern Virginia magazine’s Warren Rojas yesterday with an emergency request: Would Rojas mind if Ezra Klein’s new column on food politics runs under the same name as the magazine’s Gut Check blog?
It was an honorable move on Yonan’s part. It just came late in the game. By the time the two scribes connected yesterday, the Post’s Food section had already gone to print with Klein’s Gut Check column in it. Yonan proceeded to do the right thing and offered to change the title after the fact.
Rojas didn’t think that was unnecessary.
“I didn’t make a stink because I didn’t make up the phrase,” Rojas told Y&H this afternoon. “I’m fairly confident that no one will confuse [Klein's] academic style with our free-form blog.”
So how did the near-snafu occur?
The name of the column was submitted by a reader via an online contest, which drew hundreds of responses, Yonan wrote me via e-mail today. Yonan thought Gut Check “fit really well” with Klein’s concept; it just took some time to reach that conclusion.
“We were sifting through and tossing them around right up until deadline, and in that rush neglected to do our due diligence in the checking, which is how we ended up picking one that we later remembered was the same as warren’s fun blog,” Yonan writes.
Adds Yonan: “Since warren was so understanding about all this, no harm, no foul.”
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4:11 pm
I wonder if this disqualifies the winning entry from receiving the prize (not that it was anything huge).
In their original call for suggestions on the 24th, Yonan wrote:
“There’s just one thing missing: a name. Can you help? Give us your ideas in the comments section below. The person who submits the snappiest name (hint: Make sure it’s original, not already the title of a book or a column in another publication) will get a special prize from our stash of books and gizmos.”
4:12 pm
Mike,
Good question. Maybe Joe will be kind enough to respond here.
-Tim
4:21 pm
I sympathize with accidental duplication, but google “gut check” dc and it’s the second thing that comes up – after this story.
4:27 pm
This is the sort of thing that happens when you run off all the senior editorial managers from the Web site. You see, there was a whole process for vetting names through legal so TWP wouldn’t get sued for trademark infringement (which it nearly did years ago when the online style section was renamed ‘arts & leisure,’ prompting a polite note from the NYT’s lawyers.)
But when the people who know about that process are forced out or, more likely, cut out of the loop on something like this, then you wind up with this sort of mistake. I blame the “culture of the infallible editor” mentality at TWP and the failure of top managers to encourage people to challenge it.
Maybe we’ll find out that some BIG media company has a trademark on “gut check.” That’ll spice things up.
4:31 pm
Seems some smart people in St. Louis have a long-standing blog called “Gut Check”
http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/gutcheck/
Or perhaps this guy has a case?
http://www.gut-check.com/
5:28 pm
I think that using Gut Check violates the rules of the contest-in spirit at least. Now, I can see if this wasn’t the WaPo- say rather, a distant paper. However, NoVa magazine’s writer has been doing a blog called “Gut Check” for a while now, and while it’s not a column, it is the writing of a food critic.
In another scenario, would it be right to name the column Young & Hungry”? Tim, you’ve had this wonderful, established blog, which is not a newspaper column. Would you mind?
Then again, perhaps the name is already claimed/copyrighted.
Thanks in advance.