Image Credit – Goopymart on Flickr
For the last couple of weeks, geeks from around the world have been hanging out in Austin, Texas for South-By-Southwest (SXSW). The festival is just about over now, but alongside the stream of news, reviews and interviews coming out of the event is a rather unsettling amount of navel gazing and controversy relating film journalists/bloggers.
Last Thursday, Catherine Shoard, film editor at The Guardian published an article entitled “SXSW film: The pros and cons of geek domination”. It’s an interesting read, but it also made some rather dubious points, particularly in it’s depiction of online writers.
Shoard characterises bloggers as, “the thick-set, dense-bearded, logo T-shirted, hooting, whooping, white, apparently heterosexual thirtysomethings”, who are interested primarily in blockbuster movies, and are desperate to cultivate a relationship with their idols. This may have been true of the online film writer community ten or twelve years ago, and may still hold true at SXSW, but it simply does not represent the majority of us working today.
In reality, the film bloggers are writers, of both sexes, ranging from students to retirees. Some write exclusively for their own sites, with only a handful of visitors, while others contribute to collective blogs with a much larger audiences. In addition to this, many bloggers also write for ‘mainstream’ websites with millions of hits every day. Some even have articles published on dead trees, although quite why anyone would bother with that is beyond me.
Almost without exception these people not only love film, but have a knowledge of it that is broad and deep, and for the record, most of them have the same degree of scorn that every other intellectually capable adult has for the continual stream of very stupid movies being churned out by lazy studio executives.
The article also features a quote from Joe Cornish that he may well live to regret, “[bloggers are] film champions, rather than film critics. If they don’t like something, they just won’t write about it”. Which is incredibly optimistic of Cornish, and sadly, for a man with a film due for release, also a little delusional. The truth is, most of us are as hard on films as any of our peers, if not more so. It is true that we’ll often reduce coverage on a film if we’ve seen it and hated it (who wants to regurgitate yet another press release about a piece of crap?), but we will always publish the review.
Then there’s the quote from Anne Thompson, which is so condescending and rude, I’m singling it out with its own paragraph:
“The people who write them would rankle at being called fansites, but they aren’t journalists. And yet they’re increasingly getting the scoops. Their leverage with studios comes from providing a direct line between the films and the fans.”
The fact is that, for a certain type of blog, real journalism is key to their success, and their writers are some of the only entertainment reporters who could possibly be described as ‘journalists’.
While the trades (Variety, Screen International, The Hollywood Reporter) and the traditional media spend their time sorting through press releases, sites like Latino Review, The Daily Blam and Bleeding Cool pursue real stories, by developing sources, chasing leads and finding confirmation. This may be low level, and it may be about something entirely inconsequential, but this is, by any standards, the very definition of ‘journalism’.
In an ideal world, this article would end here, with a smug little sign off flipping a virtual two fingered salute at Anne Thompson, but if I were to do so, I’d be ignoring a fucking great neon-pink, woolly mammoth in the room – journalistic ethics.
Two days before Shoard’s article was published, A journalist for Tech Crunch, Alexia Tsotsis, was invited by sister site, MovieFone to interview Duncan Jones and Jake Gyllenhaal about the use of social media to market Source Code. For some, rather inexplicable reason, the marketing bods at Summit took umbrage with the tone Tsotsis had used in her subsequent article, and complained to MovieFone editor in chief Patricia Chui, who sent Tsotsis an e-mail, wondering if “the snark can be toned down”.
Following so far? If not, Pajiba did a far better job than I could of summarising the whole affair.
What is really important is that, at the end of a week that saw a MovieFone editor do something really stupid, and two TechCrunch staff behave like a pair of spiteful children, the only professional casualty was Scott Weinberg*, who, in spite of having nothing to do with the scandal, resigned from his post as editor of Cinematical, yet another MovieFone sister site, because the whole incident was “just the ass-kick I needed”.
That is to say, a ‘blogger’, as derided by Thompson and Shoard, felt that to maintain his integrity he had to give up his job. When was the last time an entertainment hack for a dead tree publication did that?
Of course, we don’t all have the same sense of ethics as Mister Weinberg, but we try. We may publish a lot of articles based on press releases, and get more excited than is entirely sensible about certain films, but we still attempt to remain as professional and detached as possible.
This becomes extremely difficult under some circumstances. Set visits, for example represent a real challenge. I defy anyone invited to a set of a $100+ film not to write a report in the fashion of an excited schoolboy. For a feature writer like myself, seeing Hollywood in action is a visceral thrill that comes across in my subsequent reporting. The saving grace of this is that, it would appear, at least, that readers like this style.
That said if I have been to a set, I will not review that film. Indeed, I feel quite bad reviewing a film where I’ve had any contact with anyone involved with it. In an ideal world there would be a separation within sites of reviewers from real people, and never would someone who specialises in interviews be called upon to give an opinion on the latest release. Sadly, for most outlets, this is growing less and less possible, as publicists have their screening budgets slashed, and access to screenings becomes more and more limited.
Even still, most of us take pride in writing independent reviews, and to my knowledge, not a single one of my colleagues has been asked to tone down a review by a studio, or an agent thereof. Most of the editors I have know, both in the UK and the US are belligerent enough that a request to amend a review would be met with an e-mail telling the publicist to fuck off, and a very well publicised article soon after.
I have been involved with requests to tone down news articles. On one occasion I did so as a publicist, and had my request (reluctantly) honoured. Otherwise it’s been as a journalist, getting calls from interviewees asking for content to be removed. In both cases I complied with the request on the grounds that the people involved were facing legal action for what they had said. While I wasn’t happy about either situation, and my reputation took a bit of a kicking from each, it’s only entertainment reporting, and I would rather my ego take a bruising, than see someone at the start of their career sued. I’d still never tone down a review though.
It is certain that there are a few people in the blogosphere who are nothing more than studio whores, publishing every press release they receive, and writing uncritical praise of everything they see. That’s also true for the legitimate media too, in the same way that it’s true that there are many outlets which belligerently slag off movies and particular filmmakers to get a reputation. But it’s not true of most.
Like it or not, the industry is changing, and web-based content is coming to the fore. As it does, talented writers, who would in decades past have found themselves staffing for magazines or newspapers, are now competing for scraps of freelance work, and writing for blogs in their spare time to maintain a profile; while those wishing to break into the industry find writing for a film blog a preferable, and more rewarding option than spending months perfecting their tea-making skills as an unpaid intern at a magazine.
This influx of talent is forcing us to up our game, both in terms of content and quality. The converse is true too, as we as a community encourage the abilities of new writers, and set standards of behaviour. The most dramatic example of this was last year’s plagiarism scandal (follow the link for a much better explanation of the fiasco than I could give), but it happens on a daily basis through e-mails, tweets and private conversations, as we criticise or question when other bloggers do silly things.
There is still room for improvement. At the very least we need to separate out the reporters from the reviewers, particularly at larger outlets. We also need to start disclosing when we accept ‘swag’ – whether it’s a goody bag at an interview, or a hotel/flight to a junket. It might not have any influence on our coverage, but readers deserve to know.
I’m sure there are other things we could work on too, but the underlying point is, the days of the movie blogging being dominated by unprofessional, dribbling cretins with no knowledge of film outside of continuity errors in Star Wars are over, if they ever existed at all. Our colleagues in the mainstream media would do well to recognise that.
*It’s probably prudent in an article relating to ethics to declare that Scott is someone I occasionally exchange tweets with, and have a huge deal of respect for.
