First: hey, thanks. There?s nothing so cool as seeing people you love and things you know through someone else?s eyes. Always a treat. And while some might knock the gonzo excess of your prose stylings, well, I?ve always been a fan of exuberance, myself. Give me a voice that knows what it wants and goes after it full-tilt: I might wince at the occasional typo and grammatical misstep, but at the end of the day I?m going to like it better and remember it longer than bog-standard A1 clarity. Just a word of advice: I know they made it look easy, those gonzo guys, like all you had to do was live through it and then sit down with some liquor and stimulants and, you know, type, but it?s hard, gonzo is. Harder than bog-standard A1 clarity. Injecting yourself into your journalism requires a delicate balancing act between self-indulgence and self-awareness, and just because you?re subjective as all get-out, that?s no excuse for slacking off on the underlying facts. (Just because bog-standard A1 is fvcking up on that front these days is no excuse, either.) ?Oh, hell, you?re tempted to tell yourself; they?ll get the gist of it, even if the facts aren?t all that. Any publicity?s good. Don?t listen: down that road lies the devil.
But we?ll get to that.
As for myself? Well, I?ve got no complaints with how I?m handled. ?Build databases for corporate lawsuits.? Pretty much. I might quibble at being called an ?adult,? but that?s my hang-up, not yours. (On the other hand, while I?m hardly the best there is at staining and varnishing, I?d like to think our new front door looks slightly nicer than something you?d pick up at the Home Depot.) ?But! I never met you, or spoke with you directly, and anyway, I?m only in the thing for a paragraph and a half. Which, granted, is more than Craig Thompson got. So I?m good as far as that goes.
The rest? ?At least, the bits I can speak to authoritatively?
Well, first, it?s Dicebox. Not Dice Box. ?A small thing, but the devil?s in the details, such as the title of the comic by your subject of the moment. Or the fact that it?s not available exclusively at dicebox.net (rather than jennworks.com?but hey, URLs, who reads ?em?). It?s also and one might even say primarily available at Girlamatic. And while the checks she gets from Girlamatic might only be enough for some beer and the occasional software upgrade, it?s still not entirely accurate to say that Dicebox is ?not capitalized, at all.? There?s no action figures, granted; no T-shirts or posters or stickers or tchotchkes. Yet. (We?re still trying to get her to sell the notecards she does.) But Girlamatic does sell advertising on the site; and if your readers manage to make it there, they might well be unpleasantly surprised by the subscription fee they?ll have to pay to read the archives. (We will leave out the plans for eventual print publication; a distraction.)
I know, I know: this messes with the whole ?heady Northwest Linux brew collides head-on with the soy-lentil-green-indie arts scene? riff, which I?m sure tested well in the bullpen. But sometimes we must kill our favorite children to make the overall piece.
Moving on: Anodyne is not a parallel project to Dicebox. Anodyne, in fact, died back in 1999; Dicebox took off in 2002. Nor is it entirely clear to your readers that Anodyne was a freely distributed local arts monthly, not a?well, I?m not sure what they?d think, coming out of that paragraph, but it reads like an editor?s blue pencil took a bad fall in the middle of one of the sentences and never recovered, so we?ll let it slide. (But: neutrinos? Mathematical constructs that conserve energy in the equations that describe half-life decay. No half-life themselves to speak of, much less a blisteringly fast one. ?I know, I know, they?ll get the gist of it. Yes yes. Moving on.)
As to the aura Jenn that exudes??blushing rose,? at one point, shading to ?purple? when she says ?It?s a public form of self-expression??and her ?Buddha-esque? stature as the ?gravitational center in that ethereally radiating alternate reality that is so genuinely precious and fiercely protected in the sweet funky neighborhoods of Portland?? ?Well, it?s hard to quibble with someone who says something so sweet. And her ?transcendentally radiant, gently surreal inner sanctum? is pretty much spot-on, as anyone who?s seen her studio can attest. (Still: ?Buddha-esque??)
But! You?re being genuinely subjective, there, expressing what you saw, as you saw it. I?m not going to contest you on those grounds. It?s when you try to do the same thing through the supposedly objective means of quoting someone directly that we get, well, iffier:
Why stay on the Web? ?Distributors! The comics industry is slowly collapsing on itself. Most retail comics stores in North America that want to carry popular comics deal with Diamond Comics Distribution. It has a virtual monopoly. It sells through its catalog, Previews. If a publisher wants its product to be listed in Previews, it has to pay for ads in the catalog?no problem for the majors, but small publishers can?t afford the extra costs. Now Diamond has a rule that it won?t list any comic that doesn?t sell 2,500 copies per month. I haven?t wanted to bother with it.?
Now, granted, I wasn?t there to hear what was actually said, or in what context, any more than I know what?s actually your writing and what was inserted or amended by an editor. So I don?t know how many of the inaccuracies in the above are due to your own misunderstanding of an abstruse and marginal business plan, granted, and how many are due to Jenn hazarding guesses at some placeholder stats in the service of a more fundamental point, but when your subject of the moment says ?Don?t quote me on this,? and ?You need to check that before you say anything about it? and goes to the trouble of warning your fact-checker, too, well.
Can I kick off a tangent here, just for a moment? It?s germane, honest. ?See, I?ve never taken a course in journalistic ethics myself, but I have written my share of feature articles and personality sketches back in the day, and I always tried to keep in mind the case of Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc.
Jeffrey Masson was a psychoanalyst who, while serving as Project Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives, grew disenchanted with the father of his art; Janet Malcolm wrote a profile of him for the New Yorker that proved less than flattering. A libel suit was filed. And, while she quoted him at length saying words she couldn?t prove with notes or tape recordings that he?d actually said, Masson lost the suit. ?At one point, in fact, she says he described himself as an ?intellectual gigolo? when the closest the court could find to that in his actual words was ?much too junior within the hierarchy of analysis for these important . . . analysts to be caught dead with [him]??and still, he lost.
So congratulations! As journalists, we?ve got great power: we can make sh1t up and stick it in other people?s mouths. (Specifically, ?the common law of libel overlooks minor inaccuracies and concentrates upon substantial truth.? But that?s in America, bucko; don?t try it overseas.) ?But as you should have realized the moment you set out to write about comics, with great power comes great responsibility. (It?s in the pamphlet they give you at the door.) The law sets forth the bare minimum: you can elide stuffily tedentious self-descriptors down to snappily inaccurate soundbites so long as you don?t violate substantial truth. Beyond that, well, we?ve got to call on ethics. (Do keep Malcom?s own snappy self-descriptor in mind: ?Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself knows that what he does is morally indefensible.?)
And at this point you?re asking yourself what the hell the fallout from a contentious multi-million dollar libel suit can teach us about a freelance puff piece on cartoonists in a $3.99 glossy ad-horse. I actually wonder who's been reading this far. I'm pretty sure there is going to be tons of "cliffs" or "notes!" but whatever. For those who are actually reading, congradulations and pat yourselves on the back. This is part two of my self-imposed experiement of the off topic crew. The first one was seeing how many people would click on a random thread. I got forty views and nine posts in five minutes on a thread titled: Something you have to see. Imagine that. Now I'm seeing who's actually reading these articles instead of saying random stuff about what other people say. PM me if you actually read this. You can post if you want, but I think it'll give away the experiment if someone posts, lol that was funny what you put in midarticle. ok, so good luck guys. This is not a neffing post. If you'll notice, I won't post until after about ten minutes and will not edit this origional post in any way. Hell, you?re probably saying, I never elided anything! I didn?t make anything up at all! That?s what she said! I?m pretty sure! What gives?
Let?s step through it:
You?re interviewing someone about their webcomics publishing venture and you ask them, why the web? And they tell you there?s a lot of barriers to traditional print publishing. And you ask, like what? And maybe they say something like industry collapsing, Diamond monopoly, ads in the catalog, 2,500 copies. ?And you do some research, and you find out that the industry has been through a rough patch, but sales in some quarters are showing signficant upticks; that Diamond in the mad bad days of the late ?90s pretty much had a virtual monopoly, yes, and it?s true that almost every direct-market comics shop in the country still has to deal with them, but there?s a number of competitors now, and new if untested markets cropping up all over, like manga in Borders and strips on, hey, the web; that no, you don?t have to buy ads in the catalog to get listed, just glancing at the thing will tell you that, though if you ask around you?ll hear dark mutterings from some quarters of preferential treatment for those who buy ads (then again, this is a business: what?s new?) and if you do more than glance at the thing you?ll note the listings are so small that it?s pretty much impossible to get noticed at all without buying some real estate to strut your stuff; that Diamond (it?s said) prefers sales of $1,000 a pop with a reliable growth curve over the first few issues, not so much a firm floor of 2,500 copies.
Given that you can make up whatever you like and stick it in their mouth, so long as you don?t violate substantial truth, what do you do?
Well. That all depends on what the substantial truth is, doesn?t it?
And this is why journalism is morally indefensible, and this is why ethics are paramount, at the end of the day. ?Are you writing a drily witty, razor-keen hit piece? Well. What you?ll want to do is polish what was said until minor inaccuracies reflect the subject of the moment?s ostensible paranoia and aggrandizing sense of self-importance?conspiracies, projection, sour grapes. Ethically impeccable, morally indefensible, but hey, substantial truth, right?
But we?ll get to that.
As for myself? Well, I?ve got no complaints with how I?m handled. ?Build
The rest? ?At least, the bits I can speak to authoritatively?
Well, first, it?s Dicebox. Not Dice Box. ?A small thing, but the devil?s in the details, such as the title of the comic by your subject of the moment. Or the fact that it?s not available exclusively at dicebox.net (rather than jennworks.com?but hey, URLs, who reads ?em?). It?s also and one might even say primarily available at Girlamatic. And while the checks she gets from Girlamatic might only be enough for some beer and the occasional software upgrade, it?s still not entirely accurate to say that Dicebox is ?not capitalized, at all.? There?s no action figures, granted; no T-shirts or posters or stickers or tchotchkes. Yet. (We?re still trying to get her to sell the notecards she does.) But Girlamatic does sell advertising on the site; and if your readers manage to make it there, they might well be unpleasantly surprised by the subscription fee they?ll have to pay to read the archives. (We will leave out the plans for eventual print publication; a distraction.)
I know, I know: this messes with the whole ?heady Northwest Linux brew collides head-on with the soy-lentil-green-indie arts scene? riff, which I?m sure tested well in the bullpen. But sometimes we must kill our favorite children to make the overall piece.
Moving on: Anodyne is not a parallel project to Dicebox. Anodyne, in fact, died back in 1999; Dicebox took off in 2002. Nor is it entirely clear to your readers that Anodyne was a freely distributed local arts monthly, not a?well, I?m not sure what they?d think, coming out of that paragraph, but it reads like an editor?s blue pencil took a bad fall in the middle of one of the sentences and never recovered, so we?ll let it slide. (But: neutrinos? Mathematical constructs that conserve energy in the equations that describe half-life decay. No half-life themselves to speak of, much less a blisteringly fast one. ?I know, I know, they?ll get the gist of it. Yes yes. Moving on.)
As to the aura Jenn that exudes??blushing rose,? at one point, shading to ?purple? when she says ?It?s a public form of self-expression??and her ?Buddha-esque? stature as the ?gravitational center in that ethereally radiating alternate reality that is so genuinely precious and fiercely protected in the sweet funky neighborhoods of Portland?? ?Well, it?s hard to quibble with someone who says something so sweet. And her ?transcendentally radiant, gently surreal inner sanctum? is pretty much spot-on, as anyone who?s seen her studio can attest. (Still: ?Buddha-esque??)
But! You?re being genuinely subjective, there, expressing what you saw, as you saw it. I?m not going to contest you on those grounds. It?s when you try to do the same thing through the supposedly objective means of quoting someone directly that we get, well, iffier:
Why stay on the Web? ?Distributors! The comics industry is slowly collapsing on itself. Most retail comics stores in North America that want to carry popular comics deal with Diamond Comics Distribution. It has a virtual monopoly. It sells through its catalog, Previews. If a publisher wants its product to be listed in Previews, it has to pay for ads in the catalog?no problem for the majors, but small publishers can?t afford the extra costs. Now Diamond has a rule that it won?t list any comic that doesn?t sell 2,500 copies per month. I haven?t wanted to bother with it.?
Now, granted, I wasn?t there to hear what was actually said, or in what context, any more than I know what?s actually your writing and what was inserted or amended by an editor. So I don?t know how many of the inaccuracies in the above are due to your own misunderstanding of an abstruse and marginal business plan, granted, and how many are due to Jenn hazarding guesses at some placeholder stats in the service of a more fundamental point, but when your subject of the moment says ?Don?t quote me on this,? and ?You need to check that before you say anything about it? and goes to the trouble of warning your fact-checker, too, well.
Can I kick off a tangent here, just for a moment? It?s germane, honest. ?See, I?ve never taken a course in journalistic ethics myself, but I have written my share of feature articles and personality sketches back in the day, and I always tried to keep in mind the case of Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc.
Jeffrey Masson was a psychoanalyst who, while serving as Project Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives, grew disenchanted with the father of his art; Janet Malcolm wrote a profile of him for the New Yorker that proved less than flattering. A libel suit was filed. And, while she quoted him at length saying words she couldn?t prove with notes or tape recordings that he?d actually said, Masson lost the suit. ?At one point, in fact, she says he described himself as an ?intellectual gigolo? when the closest the court could find to that in his actual words was ?much too junior within the hierarchy of analysis for these important . . . analysts to be caught dead with [him]??and still, he lost.
So congratulations! As journalists, we?ve got great power: we can make sh1t up and stick it in other people?s mouths. (Specifically, ?the common law of libel overlooks minor inaccuracies and concentrates upon substantial truth.? But that?s in America, bucko; don?t try it overseas.) ?But as you should have realized the moment you set out to write about comics, with great power comes great responsibility. (It?s in the pamphlet they give you at the door.) The law sets forth the bare minimum: you can elide stuffily tedentious self-descriptors down to snappily inaccurate soundbites so long as you don?t violate substantial truth. Beyond that, well, we?ve got to call on ethics. (Do keep Malcom?s own snappy self-descriptor in mind: ?Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself knows that what he does is morally indefensible.?)
And at this point you?re asking yourself what the hell the fallout from a contentious multi-million dollar libel suit can teach us about a freelance puff piece on cartoonists in a $3.99 glossy ad-horse. I actually wonder who's been reading this far. I'm pretty sure there is going to be tons of "cliffs" or "notes!" but whatever. For those who are actually reading, congradulations and pat yourselves on the back. This is part two of my self-imposed experiement of the off topic crew. The first one was seeing how many people would click on a random thread. I got forty views and nine posts in five minutes on a thread titled: Something you have to see. Imagine that. Now I'm seeing who's actually reading these articles instead of saying random stuff about what other people say. PM me if you actually read this. You can post if you want, but I think it'll give away the experiment if someone posts, lol that was funny what you put in midarticle. ok, so good luck guys. This is not a neffing post. If you'll notice, I won't post until after about ten minutes and will not edit this origional post in any way. Hell, you?re probably saying, I never elided anything! I didn?t make anything up at all! That?s what she said! I?m pretty sure! What gives?
Let?s step through it:
You?re interviewing someone about their webcomics publishing venture and you ask them, why the web? And they tell you there?s a lot of barriers to traditional print publishing. And you ask, like what? And maybe they say something like industry collapsing, Diamond monopoly, ads in the catalog, 2,500 copies. ?And you do some research, and you find out that the industry has been through a rough patch, but sales in some quarters are showing signficant upticks; that Diamond in the mad bad days of the late ?90s pretty much had a virtual monopoly, yes, and it?s true that almost every direct-market comics shop in the country still has to deal with them, but there?s a number of competitors now, and new if untested markets cropping up all over, like manga in Borders and strips on, hey, the web; that no, you don?t have to buy ads in the catalog to get listed, just glancing at the thing will tell you that, though if you ask around you?ll hear dark mutterings from some quarters of preferential treatment for those who buy ads (then again, this is a business: what?s new?) and if you do more than glance at the thing you?ll note the listings are so small that it?s pretty much impossible to get noticed at all without buying some real estate to strut your stuff; that Diamond (it?s said) prefers sales of $1,000 a pop with a reliable growth curve over the first few issues, not so much a firm floor of 2,500 copies.
Given that you can make up whatever you like and stick it in their mouth, so long as you don?t violate substantial truth, what do you do?
Well. That all depends on what the substantial truth is, doesn?t it?
And this is why journalism is morally indefensible, and this is why ethics are paramount, at the end of the day. ?Are you writing a drily witty, razor-keen hit piece? Well. What you?ll want to do is polish what was said until minor inaccuracies reflect the subject of the moment?s ostensible paranoia and aggrandizing sense of self-importance?conspiracies, projection, sour grapes. Ethically impeccable, morally indefensible, but hey, substantial truth, right?