Thousands of copies of New Zealand's Sunday Star-Times' Sunday magazine were distributed to subscribers with four pages ripped off, costing the paper a large sum of money in advertising and labour cost.
The paper had to call in emergency workers to tear out the pages because one of them contained the editor's letter which some senior editors thought was too offensive for conservative New Zealanders.
The problem with the edition was that its editor had written about a bloggers sexual exploits and had copied an entry from the blog.She had asterixed any offending words but it wasfelt that even this measure was too explicit for the New Zealand public.
Interestingly any referenence to the blogger Suzanne Portnoy has been erased from the publications web site.
1 comment:
Hi Nigel,
I've been investigating this one, being the offending sex blogger and here's what I have found out. The article was one syndicated from News International - a 4 page feature about the rise of the 40 something sexually liberated woman that first appeared on the cover of the Sunday Times Magazine. You can read the article by going to the press section of my blog, www.suzanneportnoy.com. I know this because I spoke to News International in London who confirmed they had syndicated the article to the New Zealand paper. Someone in New Zealand managed to find a paper with the article intact and confirmed there was nothing particularly risque or offensive in it. The New Zealand Herald refers to me as a 'porn queen' whereas in fact I am a middle-aged, single mother of two kids who happens to write sex confessionals, the first of which went on to become a bestseller. The second has just come out, hence why I was featured in the Sunday Times in the U.K. Finally, the editor's letter was what seemed to cause controversy. The offending extract was one that came from a website featured on my blogroll, Always Aroused Girl. It was not from my own site but my site was referenced in the editor's letter. All very confusing and sadly for New Zealand readers they weren't able to read what was a very good article written by one of the UK's top journalists, Lesley White.
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