Tag Archives: blogging

The bitchy reviewer responds!

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In an extremely tardy response to my blog post about The Gazette’s bitchy review of Jon Paul Fiorentino’s Stripmalling (written way back in April), I recently received some email from the bitchy reviewer himself, Claude Lalumière! He said not to bother responding, after his editor at ChiZine Publications, Brett Savory, left me a bitchy comment on my blog, which was promptly deleted. I wrote to Savory to inform him that his comment was being deleted for its rude tone, and instead of forming a civil response (so as to ensure the hoped-for correction), he wrote me a nasty email arguing the same point in an even bitchier tone. And they say editors today have no people skills!

Since they two of them decided to tag-team me, I obviously have no choice but to correct the mistake from my previous blog as publicly as I can.

According to Savory, Lalumière has never engaged in vanity publishing, and after looking over a list of his publishing credits, I will admit I miswrote. The original comment I had written in my blog read:

“According to your blog, you’ve got some online fiction, zines, and a few stories that have been included in anthologies. Wow, that’s really ambitious! You haven’t even written a novel, much less a full volume of poetry, and your only publisher so far has been… you. Oh, and someplace called ChiZine Publications, who will be publishing your very first work.”

Clearly, what I meant to write is that Claude Lalumière has never published a book-length work in his life, much less a novel, and therefore has no business arguing that someone like Jon Paul Fiorentino has created a work of fiction that is somehow lacking in “ambition” [his term, as argued in his bitchy Gazette review].

So, no, Lalumière is not a vanity presser. He’s just not a novelist, nor is he a person with ambition, judging by the lack of novel-length works on his list of publications. Considering that this was, essentially, his beef with JPF (saying “[…] he can’t be bothered to at least try to create a work of some ambition”), I guess that makes him a hypocrite! And also, given his über-bitchy email to me (which he actually told me was “not fodder for your blog,” btw, as if he has any right to tell someone else what subjects or material they can or cannot write about in a personal blog—an arena that does NOT go by the same journalistic standards as a newspaper), I’d call him a straight-up douchebag. You know: the type of person who, when misrepresented, decides to pick a fight with the person in question, rather than attempting to correct the matter like a civil member of our nice, polite society.

You know what, Lalumière? You’ve already dug your own grave. After reading your bitchy review, I decided I’d never bother reading any of your work, and I bet plenty of other people felt the same way. I wasn’t alone in thinking the review was needlessly catty, that’s for sure. But now that you’ve taken your attempt at defending that bitchy review to the level of writing bitchy “personal” emails to the person who dared to call you on your bad public behaviour, don’t think for a second that I’m going to just sit back and let you walk all over me, too. I have the right to express my own opinions, and I have, and I shall. So get over it, because that’s what people do in their blogs.

In the future, if anyone wants me to correct factual inaccuracies here, all it takes is a polite email or comment. I have corrected and will continue to correct mistakes in my blog, if supplied with proper counter-evidence. However, I simply cannot be bothered with responding to angry, ranty, or purely bitchy comments, regardless of the nature of the requests that may be buried in the venom. If you want results from this blogger, you’ll have to try being polite for once in your life. Period.

P.S. I did finally read Stripmalling, after my original blog post, and my review of it has been online at Fiction Writers Review since June 1, 2009.

Save the newspapers — just add porn!

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I don’t usually watch The Colbert Report (mostly because I’m an old lady and go to bed before 11), but after reading a tweet from my QWF teacher (and fellow Hour reporter) Craig Silverman, I watched a few clips from the recent show where Stephen Colbert interviews Newspaper Association of America President John Sturm.

In typical Colbert fashion, Sturm gets skewered when Colbert asks him various questions about the crisis in the newspaper industry, to the point where Colbert asks Sturm a knock-knock joke at the end of the interview that goes like this:

Colbert: Knock-knock!
Sturm: Who’s there?
Colbert: The death of the newspaper industry.

Needless to say, Sturm didn’t find this terribly funny. But you know what? Colbert’s report, humorous as it may have been with its suggestion to incorporate huge porn sections into online newspapers, has a serious point: what’s up with the online newspaper’s business model?! I have been wondering for years why anyone would “buy the milk when you can get the cow for free,” so to speak, but perhaps more importantly, I have to ask: If newspapers continue to give their content away for free, doesn’t this undermine their whole existence? Honestly, why should anyone go out and buy a daily paper—or even a subscription delivered to their front door—when you can have all of the exact same news delivered to your inbox or your feed reader, every day, automatically, without paying a cent?

stephencolbert

“That’s a hard business model,” Colbert observes. And he’s exactly right. So what are newspapers doing to get their business models updated for the 21st century? How do they plan to make money as many close their doors completely and others can’t compete online with the millions of blogs, Twitter and other amateur reporters posting up-to-the-second information around the clock?

While Colbert’s suggestion to add porn to the news sites is obviously seen as contrary to journalistic ethics, I don’t see why it couldn’t be taken seriously. After all, if you’ll pay for porn, why not pay for porn and news together? If news sites require age verification like any porn site, this will keep minors from accessing it (in theory, anyway—which is really all anyone can hope for even on actual porn sites), and those readers not interested in a porn + news combo-pack can go for a less expensive “news only” option. I personally predict no one will sign up for the “news only” option, but best to offer it nevertheless.

I don’t particularly think that reputable news outlets like the New York Times will be amenable to the concept of offering news alongside porn content, and they’d certainly have to partner up with a porn site that is equally “venerable” in its own line of business to make it work, but it’s not a completely insane idea, either. After all, there’s plenty of sex journalism out there already, and many weekly/alternative papers already offer personal ads, escorting and massage ads, and a sex column in the back of the paper. Is it really that far a stretch to consider adding sexual content to sell online news? For that matter, is there anything unethical about offering people what they really want to see or read? Isn’t that, in the end, the whole point of publishing?

UPDATED 1:41 PM: If you’re looking for a few slightly more serious suggestions on how to save your paper, try Gypsy Bandito’s “How to Save a Local Newspaper” or, if you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, you might want to check out Spot.Us, an open source project to pioneer “community funded reporting.”