I stumbled across this lovely food blog today, called Market Manila. However, it wasn’t the food stuff that intrigued me, but the entries concerning an unauthorized publication of one of the owner’s pictures in the country’s best-read daily newspaper.

November 18, 2005:
In the Philippine Daily Inquirer yesterday (page C4) and on their on-line website (both with a readership numbering in the millions on a local and global scale, compared with my modest base of 2-3,000 wonderful and loyal readers) an article by James Anthony R. Ceniza on Yema Balls features a stunning photograph of a yema sitting on an unwrapped pink cellophane wrapper…. The problem is that the photo is EXACTLY like a Marketmanila photograph that I took on April 16 (shown here at right) of a yema I had purchased from the Salcedo Saturday Market and which was featured in my own post on yema. And the other photograph used in the article is exactly like the photograph of yema by fellow food blogger Karen at Pilgrims Pots & Pans…

Yikes. MarketMan has a follow-up post about how he and the Inquirer are trying to resolve the issue. Micketymoc has put together pictorial evidence of the plagiarism and Sassy Lawyer recaps it.

The Inquirer is keeping mum on the issue right now, although they did take down the photos. The only coverage I’ve seen on this is entirely from prominent Pinoy blogs. Blog power, indeed.

UPDATE: Inquirer writes:

IN LIEU of the PDI Family Recipes Contest winner this week, we are reprinting these two photos, which appeared with the winning melt-in-your-mouth yema balls recipe in this section (Nov. 17, p. C4), to properly credit them to two food weblogs.

Both photos were submitted by James Anthony Ceniza with the yema recipe. It has come to the attention of the Inquirer that he took the photo of the yema with the pink wrapper from the food weblog Market Manila (marketmanila.com), and the other photo from the food weblog The Pilgrims Pots & Pans (karen.mychronicles.net/?p=53. Mr. Ceniza has apologized to the owners of these food weblogs for the unauthorized use of their photos.

Not quite an apology, but at least an acknowledgement of what happened.