Matt Wilson’s blunt and excellent post at The Bureau Chiefs (the group blog of the Fake AP Stylebook creators) goes after what passes for comics and video game journalism in its present state and points out in a numbered list just why it sucks so bad. And yes, I’m pointing that out on a blog devoted to me rambling on about pop culture and my personal life and cover songs so I am probably a hypocrite but, having worked for comic and video game news sites in the past, this is a topic that I’ve thought about before.
Why do we keep doing it wrong? Why do more ‘legitimate’ news outlets think that following in those footsteps is good for them (and yes, they are starting to). Well, likely, I think that a lot of people that are interested in growing their readership imbibe the sort of snake oily principles that self-professed ‘gurus’ divest to the sycophantic and the swindled that cling to their contextually vacant advice about how one becomes popular online (and honestly, who I am to talk like I know the answer?) and think that their sites need to be run accordingly.
That means focusing on SEO over focusing on the story, it means regurgitating everything that’s remotely popular even if everyone else has run it and you don’t have a new twist on it, and it certainly means caving into a quick-edit culture and deciding to be the first rather than the best because you can just fix it later. There are way too many people writing in our niche who calculate everything that we do based on comments and clickthroughs and, honestly, that’s why everything has turned into bullshit.
But beyond that, I think another symptom of that is that fandom doesn’t want news. Fandom wants gossip. We don’t believe the answers we get in official interviews or the obviously fake, marketing-savvy responses we get from a company’s PR rep (many of whom are incredibly eager to be helpful to a blogger only as long as the ink it generates is devoted to unvarnished praise). There is a subset of fans who want to hear more about rumor and innuendo than the difficult task of finding newsworthy things about the state of the industry at large. In that respect, we do get what we deserve.
Somehow, our niche allows us the luxury of a great deal of access to the creators that support it. We don’t use that enough. Yeah, in some cases, creators won’t want to spend an hour of their time doing a phoner with someone whose audience isn’t big enough to make an impact on their sales, but my own experience talking to creators says otherwise. Barring that, send an email or hit them up on Twitter (all of comics is on Twitter apparently). And when you talk to them, ask better questions.* Don’t be like an episode of Between Two Ferns.
I think we bloggers and commentators and commenters can do better. And I know that I’m going to start trying to work on that in my comics output at Alert Nerd. The stuff I post here will still be all kinds of dumb.
*and for God’s sake, people, ask follow up questions. I read an interview with a comics creator where an interviewer could have had him in a corner and chose to let him walk right out of it. I think this happens a lot because we’re fans first and want to preserve our good relationships with our idols. Which is stupid, and is also why game developers get caught saying highly suspect shit all the time and never get pinned to the table for it.
