Was this a marketing win? Scroll telling got their name out there, but al Jazeera response was that they apologized and switched over to the free/open source equivalent to their product.
Scrollytelling would have written much the same post, except "AJ was using us in an article without their knowledge, we asked them to credit us, they did, and gave us this awesome testimonial as well".
I guess that is a win, but then again I am not likely customer in the first place.
All that tells me is, you can never trust doing business with scrollytelling.
Per the discussions here yesterday Scrolly hadn't included that in its first draft. Once alerted by this bigger publicity AJ fixed their stuff and responded professionally.
There are several faults here, on both sides. But much can be attributed to the simple mistake that people make when trying to get work done. There was clearly no conspiracy, No one intentionally hurt anyone, no one had to take it all the way to way, and I don't remember any unreasonable threats of legal action.
This could have been much worse and I have personally dealt with much less reasonable companies trying to screw me harder.
Scrolly assumed bad faith in their initial post.
"In other words, our code had been stolen, by you."
Then they got ahold of the person who caused this mess, and he said he would resolve the situation.
"We contacted the author of the piece, Hidde Boersma, who told us he sold his piece to you. This is fine. Our source code however was not included in the sale, nor could it have been. Hidde promised to resolve the situation."
Then they contacted AJ, who didn't respond back quickly. They had no relationship with Scrolly, and it's not unreasonable that this didn't get taken care of. Hidde was their man.
"In order to clarify any potential confusion on your side, here is what we were confronted with."
Dramatic language.
"In the long run, it’s likely to have been a lot more expensive to have a developer copy our code, copy the assets and put these on a server. The links not only had to have been updated by hand, inside the document, but someone would have had to un-optimize our JavaScript code, and do all the other work that allows the production to be somewhat available.
They didn't even do a good job. They did not rip many images, leading to a bad experience for your readers:"
Just being dickish, to the party that wasn't aware of Hidde's issue.
"To add insult to injury, you didn’t do a great job at ripping the code either."
More dickishness.
"Al-Jazeera, we know you understand all about journalistic integrity. You have a whole section of your website dedicated to it. The first point states:"
This is college newspaper level lame writing. You'd almost expect it to have read,
Webster's dictionary defines "ethics" as....
I'll stop now, but I don't see two parties coming out of this looking professional and reasonable, just one.
I didn't say voicing wrongdoing makes a company untrusted, but instead that doing it in an unprofessional way makes you someone that I wouldn't do business with.
The article that they rapidly fixed.
Its almost like you expect perfection and a complete lack of mistakes from companies despite the fact that companies are made of people like you and me.
If a group is willing to acknowledge a public mistake and fix it that is great news to me. So many fear critique like yours and would rather keep doing something wrong than fix it.