Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Pay Me, Damnit! Pay Me!

At the risk of beating a dead horse, a bit of follow-up. (I'll try to be brief.)

Gabe Chouinard recently lamented (at great length) the fact that the SF field doesn't do what he wants it to...but fails to actually say what he wants.

He starts off by complaining that I'm emblematic of a "reluctance to embrace anything new." He then rambles off into other areas I won't touch -- otherwise we'd be here all day -- but he's misunderstood this particular argument. (I accept that this is likely because I expressed myself badly the first time around.) Let me put it in the form of two basic laws of reviewing.

Law 1: Writing a review for any media outlet, and being paid by that media outlet, is a good thing.

Law 2: A reviewer, like a judge, should always strive to not only be impartial, but to appear impartial.

So: writing for Strange Horizons, getting paid by Strange Horizons is good. Writing for Strange Horizons, getting paid by Pyr...is bad.

This is an essential matter of journalistic ethics, and has nothing to do with "moving forward" or any visions of the future. If you accept pay from the people you cover, you might be financially better off, but you lose the appearance of impartiality, and, sooner or later, you lose the reality of it as well. And hitting the people you cover up for money, even if it's not officially money for reviews, looks like a protection racket, and will be seen as corrupt.

Gabe, I was a corporate blogger, for just about a year -- I was the sole blogger for the SFBC Blog. (Google for it; I think it's still up, cobwebbed and dark.)

I also review books, online, for pay, regularly.

Respectfully, you're trying to teach your grandmother to suck eggs. You missed the point completely.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not to be mean or anything, but I've always felt that Gabe is an internet troll. Wiki defines internet troll to be: someone who posts controversial and irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the intention of provoking other users into an emotional response . To me, that has fit Gabe to a "T" since he started up his blog. I'm not saying that this is always bad since it opens discussion, but I can say that I am getting a tad tired of him and his "controversy." But what do I know? When next he says something controversal again, I'll click on his page to see what the hoopla is.

Jonathan M said...

"Impartiality" is an awkward word. It's like "Objective" as the woman who called my review of Ratatouille "Biased".

I'd argue there's no such thing as an impartial, objective or unbiased review. They are expressions of personal preference and so reviews are all about bias, partiality and subjectivity.

I think "honesty" might be a better word. The threat from paid reviews is not that you'll come down on one side or another in a review, it's that your own views will be influenced by the perceived interests of your paymasters.

...which is why, when I kicked off this thing about the sustainability of online reviewing, I suggested that the money be filtered through proper sites so that Strange Horizons pays you to write for Strange horizons.

But I think that I agree with you that this is the challenge.


Oh and Joshua -- Despite Gabe and I having a well documented relationship, I really must take issue with your decision to characterise him as a troll. As you say, it's a forum or a chatroom term and by using it you are only displaying the narrowness of your horizons.

Gabe is a holder of unpopular opinions. He occasionally uses those opinions to provoke people into re-examining their own opinions. This is absolutely a good thing because the worst thing for any community is intellectual stagnation.

By comparing him to someone who hangs out on forums and praises the nazis or lolicon hentai in order to get a rise out of people is not only short-sighted, it actually devalues to term "troll" to the point where it becomes pretty much meaningless as all you're using it to mean now is someone who has unpopular opinions and who shares them with others.

Labeling people you disagree with as trolls is a profoundly reactionary piece of herd mentality and it only serves to stifle debate. I would suggest moving past it.

Paul Weimer said...

Gabe is a provocateur, that is to be sure. (And hey, when did he resurface again?...I recall the last *two* times he decided to pack up and go home, so to speak.

That said, as Jonathan said, his unpopular opinions do serve a useful purpose, especially if they annoy others.

Anonymous said...

Gabe is just trying to create a new scam and call it the future. Even if he ever does convince someone to pay him to review on his blog, he'll do it for about two days, yell at the world, and then close up shop, leaving a lot of people pissed, abandoned, and him chuckling with another big check he suckered out of someone.

Anonymous said...

I have to say that Gabe C. is once again using up the very, very small reservoir of good will I decided to expend on him in this new incarnation. I think troll is perhaps imprecise. The fact is, Gabe C. has just about zero experience in any facet of publishing, writing, or editing, and has never really completed any project he has turned his hand to.

Within that context, he's reduced to making "controversial" statements that, in fact, are based on a foundation of profound ignorance, in hopes of getting people's attention who should know better.

I have never known anyone who knew less about so much.

JeffV

Anonymous said...

Old Gabe seems to be postulating that reviews, not just blogs, should become a corporate sponsored advertising tool, rather than a journalistic offering of publications. In the past, we've called these press releases. In recent years, we've watched movie studios get in trouble for faking reviews and review quotes. Could such trouble be avoided if the reviewer was real but paid by the movie studio? Or would, in the age of Internet detective work that would easily reveal the financial connection between reviewer and reviewee, it be similarly decried by the audience for the product and considered a form of fraud?

Just recently, Ain't It Cool News pulled Harry Knowles' negative review of the Clone Wars animated movie off its site, and the rumor is that this is because Lucasfilm brought pressure to bear about taking away from the site access to its future films and products. So maybe even the publications are finding themselves squeezed to become advertisers. But my suspicion will be that this will not bode well either for the site or for the launch of the movie.

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