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Ben Weitzenkorn

By Ben Weitzenkorn 6/01/12 1:25pm

Employment

The unpaid author.

This Article May Be Illegal

High above Park Avenue attorney Adam Klein tells me he’ll help me sue The Observer. He’s a partner at Outten & Golden, the law firm suing the Hearst Corporation, Fox Searchlight and The Charlie Rose Show on behalf of former unpaid interns just like me.

I began my internship at The Observer in January. This article is one of the fruits of my unpaid labor. See that advertisement? That’s a source of revenue that will never trickle down quite this far.

Mr. Klein believes that in New York, there are hundreds of thousands of us—perhaps a million nationwide—all working for free, deprived of basic worker protections and rights. I barely began describing my job—working 10 to 6, four days a week, writing and researching news stories for the web—before he identified me as yet another powerless and exploited low level employee.

“I would take your case,” he said. Read More

By Ben Weitzenkorn 5/30/12 5:00pm

Etan Patz

Etan Patz as taken by his father, Stanley Patz in 1979. This photograph was taken from Wikipedia where it is listed under a Creative Commons attribution license.

Etan Patz’s Father Pulls Etan’s Photos

More than 30 years after his son Etan became one of the first missing children to appear on a milk carton, Stanley Patz has withdrawn distribution rights for his photographs from the Associated Press.

In a statement, the AP said it had removed four photos of Etan from their database and instructed its member newspapers do the same. The request came shortly after the April excavation of a Soho basement failed to uncover Etan’s remains and before Pedro Hernandez’s confession thrust the grieving family back into the media spotlight.

When 6-year-old Etan disappeared on the streets of Soho in 1979, the Patzs believed circulating the collection of personal photos (Mr. Patz is a professional photographer) would aid in their son’s speedy return. Instead, they helped make it one of the most sensational and heartbreaking media stories of the decade. Read More