When Rich Juzwiak saw a series of video clips that Jay Leno played for Taylor Swift on Monday’s broadcast of “The Tonight Show,” showing the country star reacting with similar expressions of surprise to a series of awards-show victories, he knew it looked more than familiar: he argued on his blog that the “Tonight Show” segment was taken directly from a similar Web video he made with a colleague. And now NBC says it will acknowledge the work of Mr. Juzwiak and his co-worker on Tuesday’s “Tonight Show.”
In a post published Tuesday on his blog Four Four, Mr. Juzwiak, a senior editor at VH1.com, recounts how he and Kate Spencer, the editor of VH1’s TheFabLife.com site, came up with the idea for a video compiling Ms. Swift’s facial reactions to her victories at the Country Music Association Awards, the Grammys and other awards shows. Last Tuesday they published their video, “Taylor Swift Is Surprised,” at Four Four and VH1.com.
That same day, Mr. Juzwiak said, he was contacted by Sean O’Rourke, a research coordinator for “The Tonight Show,” who wanted to use the video on that NBC late-night program. In that conversation and in several subsequent exchanges, Mr. Juzwiak said he expressed concern that he and Ms. Spencer be properly credited for their work.
The montage Mr. Leno played on Monday night seemed to take its inspiration from “Taylor Swift Is Surprised,” using several of the same awards-show scenes in the same order for the same duration. (The “Tonight Show” segment, however, uses some high-definition video where Mr. Juzwiak and Ms. Spencer’s segment uses YouTube clips or video they recorded on their DVRs.)
But when Mr. Leno introduced the segment on his program, he told Ms. Swift, “We put together a little montage of you being surprised.” Neither Mr. Juzwiak nor Ms. Spencer were mentioned at that time, and Monday’s “Tonight Show” carried no closing credits when it was broadcast.
In his post on Tuesday Mr. Juzwiak wrote that he wasn’t going to “stand by and watch when someone’s going to be so rude as to swipe something I worked on just because it was made for the Internet.”
He continued: “Newsflash to the mainstream media: just like you have actual human beings making you work, so does the Internet! A little respect for the people providing your content would be nice!”
This is a scenario Mr. Juzwiak has found himself in before. In May NPR ran a correction to a story it had posted about cellphones in contemporary horror movies, acknowledging that its story “did not adequately attribute” a video Mr. Juzwiak posted in 2009. (The NPR correction was published after Mr. Juzwiak waged a very public complaint campaign on his blog and on his Twitter account.)
In the case of “Taylor Swift Is Surprised,” Mr. Juzwiak said that he had been told by “The Tonight Show” that he and Ms. Spencer would receive attribution on Tuesday for their contributions, an account that was confirmed by a press representative at NBC.
In a telephone interview Mr. Juzwiak said media companies who crossed bloggers like him did so at their own peril.
“People are going to side with the little guy,” he said. “Just be cool from the start.”
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