Friday, July 11, 2008

I'm Sorry, But I Find This Stuff Annoying

Newsarama has started covering movies since their redesign. That's all well and good, but I still wish that they'd, I don't know, stop pretending they had a personal conversation/interview with celebrities when they really sat on a conference call where they MAYBE asked one question.

The latest annoyance? The Brendan Fraser interview regarding Journey To The Center Of The Earth (that's a great movie to see if you can grab a ticket for a 3-D showing) and The Mummy 3. The Cleveland Sun News has the same interview. I guarantee I could find others if I started using different snippets to find where other sites didn't fudge the vocabulary slightly.

True, it is a good thing that they chalked it up to "Newsarama staff" instead of crediting a particular writer, but they should really can that "Newsarama sat down with" bullshit. Really. No need to mislead people about the kind of access you have.

6 comments:

  1. This week was one of the worst for Newsarama in a good while. Having only made the comics section what I read now, there was nothing but filler from independent publishers and something semi-interesting regarding Chuck Austen's manga and a crap Best Shots review of Secret Invasion 4.

    It's like the big two were trying to send a message or something. I know interviews and the like are made in advance, but wow, nothing for a week? They even had to dive into some meaningless videos from Wizard World?

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  2. Personally, I actually liked Rich's review of Secret Invasion #4. I haven't read the issue yet, so I don't know if I AGREE with the assessment, but the review itself was a good piece of writing.

    I disagree on whether the Wizard World videos were meaningless, too. But even if you didn't like them, you have to realize that they were scheduled and recorded far before they'd know for certain that this would be a slow week. They just got lucky that they paced the release of the videos in a way that allowed them to still have new ones left for this week.

    Personally, I think the back and forth between Moonstone and Dynamite was a fairly interesting development that I don't recall seeing covered elsewhere.

    Eh, we're all entitled to our opinion. :)

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  3. **and now to stir some sh!t ...**

    You're just pissed because Newsarama fired you.

    :p

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  4. Ha! Funny! :)

    I actually feel a little bad about running this now. I've already expressed that the sort of misleading article pisses me off. At this point, it'd be more reasonable to not report on it again until they change for the better or the worse.

    And, to be honest, if I thought Matt Brady was responsible for those articles, I'd probably have kept my mouth shut to begin with. But it has to be someone else.

    I still don't get the rationale behind phrasing it that way, because the readers don't care if rubbing elbows with stars. The PR flacks can recognize a conference call interview when they see one, so they won't think, "well, if Brendan sat down with them, I can certainly have my clients do the same."

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  5. Aren't newspapers and websites paid to run those types of interviews?

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  6. I don't think they pay the papers and sites to run these interviews. It's just a "one hand washes the other" situation: the papers/sites need topical content and the studios need pub.

    I don't know that all papers/sites pretend they asked all of the questions by putting their site name in front of each one, though.

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