Santiago Cohen has been a freelance illustrator for 20 years and says he has never experienced anything like what’s happened with the first piece he created for USA WEEKEND.
Cohen, who is based in New York, remembers receiving the assignment on Dec. 3, sending sketches on Dec. 15, and providing the digital artwork of the finished product on Dec. 19. Then, the phone rang in early January and USA WEEKEND art director Pamela Taylor told him that there was a racial epithet in the piece he provided.
“She called me from the print room. She mentioned that she managed to scratch it out,” he said. The scratching refers to removing the emulsion from that part of the printing plate so that the offensive word would not appear.
At the time of the phone call, Cohen thought the mistake had been caught in time. He learned from Poynter that many issues of the magazine had already been printed with the word.
“I thought they caught it earlier. I had no idea that they printed so many newspapers … As an illustrator, you never stop to think that there are millions of copies of your work going out.”
“I feel terrible about it. I feel terrible for the art director,” Cohen says.
“I didn’t charge for it. (My fee) that’s nothing compared to the expense that they went to to fix it. It was my mistake.”
While Cohen says he feels responsible, he also realizes there are lots of other eyes on the image throughout the process.
“I think that art directors and editors should create a system for looking more closely at work before it goes to press … It’s amazing that things work most of the time.”
Cohen says he will change how he works as well. “I definitely won’t submit anything without reading every single word,” he says.
Cohen says he uses various things in collage, including sheet music and other text. “I don’t usually intend for it to have a separate meaning. I use it as texture. As an artist, I concentrate on the visual impact.”
In a letter sent by Marcia Bullard, president and CEO of USA WEEKEND, to publishers of newspapers that carry the magazine, Cohen explains why he picked The New York Times Magazine article with the offensive language.
“‘I remembered the story … as a warm story of an African American person who had some experiences living in Egypt … I forgot that [the author] used’ the offensive language.”
