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.