Cinematical Lashes Out at IESB
Posted by Neil Miller (neil@filmschoolrejects.com) on August 4, 2007
Just when we thought that we were all going to become one big happy online family, someone had to go and ruin it. From my own personal experience as an online journalist (and I use that term loosely), I have found the online community to be a very open-armed group of fans turned citizens in action. We don’t claim to be on some higher level of intellectual prowess, we just report the news, give our opinions and entertain our readers. We all do it in our own special way with our own unique flair; that is why we often find that readers don’t have a one-stop-shop for movie opinions on the web. You may find one story The Movie Blog that is particularly interesting, then you may head over to /Film or JoBlo for a completely different perspective. You come here — well, we still aren’t sure why you come here — we’ve been told we write some kick ass Top 10 lists. And we are a good time at a party.
Either way, fans of movies who use the interwebs can always find what they are looking for thanks to a hard working community of writers who put in the hours to deliver post upon post of content that transcends standard journalism and gives personality to the news. With that in mind, it is always rather disappointing to see online outlets fueding, as is the case this week with our friends over at Cinematical and IESB.net. In responding to comments made by IESB’s Robert Sanchez at the “Masters of the Web” panel at Comic-Con, Cinematical’s Ryan Stewart had the following to say:
I e-mailed Robert, asking him if we could sit on the panel. He wrote me back, saying that the reason we weren’t invited was because there were already a huge number of invitees and the Con was asking for numbers to be cut down, not expanded. Okay, sounded reasonable enough, and again, I didn’t really care. The panel was considered pretty low-rent anyway — AICN skipped it all-together. I never gave it another thought, until this morning when someone on my team pointed me to the video IESB is hosting of the event. Imagine my surprise to find Robert completely bashing Cinematical, a site that sends him tons of traffic and never shows his site anything but proper respect. Of course, he doesn’t come out and say our name — he hides behind saying ‘blog owned by AOL’ as if that could mean anything but us. Last time I checked, we’re the only movie blog owned by AOL that turns over millions of hits a month. Here’s where we got mentioned, during Robert’s diatribe about how no one gives him props:
“It’s not only established media … we’re not bloggers, for God’s sakes. I’m not a f**king blogger. You know, we might have a blog, but we don’t blog. Chud’s not a blog. Latino Review’s not a blog. And I hate when the established ‘quote unquote’ media treats us as bloggers. But at the same time, bloggers who live 300 miles away from any f**king studio will pick up our stories and they do the exact same thing. There’s even a couple that are owned, by like, AOL — I’m not gonna mention their f**king names — that will run stories without giving us credit. Or they’ll do a stupid little hyperlink, like ’sources are saying,’ you know. But they won’t mention your name. We’re the ones working our asses off to bring you guys news, and we do. I think everyone here does it full time, or almost full time. You know, we have families to support … but son of a bitch, these little bloggers who don’t do anything but live with their mom will take our stories and not give us credit and they write them up as their own.”
He then went on to compare the two sites referencing he fact that Cinematical always credits sources when reporting news, the fact that they do get plenty of scoops and the fact that they provide a lot of exclusive content to their readers. Despite the fact that I don’t disagree with the facts about Cinematical, as they are a great site that employs some great people, he does fall into a significant rant, filled with welled up emotion and anger aimed directly at Robert (you can read the whole thing for yourself here).
Here at FSR, I feel that we are often caught in the middle of this “Blog v. Non-Blog” battle. Our roots are as a blog, that is where we began. As time goes by and our site continues to grow (thanks to the patronage of our readers), we are slowly moving away from our blogging roots and getting nearer to being an all out movie news website. Yet no matter how far we stray, we will never turn our backs on the blogging community. As for the situation that has come to a head between Ryan and Robert, it is truly sad. I have great respect for both men and their respective websites. Ryan and the folks over at Cinematical deliver an insane amount of movie news, written by some very intelligent writers. Robert and his crew over at IESB provide some of the most newsworthy scoops on the web from day to day. It is as if no one digs harder to bring the world the news that the studios don’t want us to see.
The ultimate problem I see is that there seems to be a rift between to sectors of the online community, almost unnecessarily. What Robert was referring to is the fact that there are websites (specifically some blogs) out there that give online press a bad name. These sites are not responsible with information and have made studios nervous about really opening up to the online community. Unfortunately, he chose to lash out toward a site like Cinematical, which is certainly not the root of the problem. It seems sad at this point, but things are not going to get any better if online outlets continue to lash out at each other. Our real battle is with traditional media. Our readerships are larger, our interaction with our readers is more instant and undoubtedly more impactful and it is time that we get the respect that we deserve. But there is no way that can happen until the online community comes together as one. It is not about being a blog or not being a blog, it is about being part of an online community — a community that I am deeply grateful to be a part of, right along side both Robert and Ryan.
I am interested to hear your thoughts on this subject as well.
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