If The Trades Can’t Play Fair, Then We Won’t Be Friends

Posted by Neil Miller (neil@filmschoolrejects.com) on May 21, 2008

As the ever-present boss of this little corner of the interwebs, I have the honor of doing many things, including going to all the cool parties, hobnobbing with a bunch of cool people and better yet, working with the best damn writing team on the web every single day. As a recent article on AMC.com said of me, I am living the American dream — or at least the movie geek’s version of it.

Unfortunately though, there is one unsavory part of being the head dude of a major movie “blog” — and yes, we do consider ourselves to still be bloggers, it helps us to feel edgy and hip — is the politics of the job. It is the duty of someone in every organization such as this to deal with all of the daily annoyances, keep our standing in the movie website community on the up and up, and of course, be some sort of evangelist for the lowly independent online media. Because when it all comes down to it, websites — and bloggers in particular — always seem to get the short end of the stick.

And yeah, I’m sure it isn’t as bad for me as it was for pioneers such as Harry Knowles at Ain’t It Cool News and Garth Franklin of Dark Horizons back in the day, when the web was young, but we’ve still got a hill or two to climb before websites are finally recognized as reputable, reliable news outlets. That is why it is always important for sites such as FSR to stick together with others around the web and throw sand in the eyes of the “traditional media” every once in a while. And yes, we will fight dirty — make no bones about it.

If you are a reader of more than one movie site, which we hope that you are, you may have stumbled across a rising trend in the way news is being broken. No longer are trade rags such as Variety and The Hollywood Reporter solely responsible for breaking the news. Nowadays, news can break from just about anywhere — anyone with a spy in the right place at the right time can bust a story wide open. Heck, even little ‘ole FSR has dropped a few on you, including the casting of Ellen Page in Drew Barrymore’s Whip It and the confirmed appearance of The Blob in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Yes, in this era of the internet even the blindest squirrels are finding ways to get some nuts… Moving on.

The whole point is that these stories are coming from all over the place, movie websites big and small, but mostly in the middle. And over the years, trade magazines (the aforementioned Variety and THR) have also picked up the stories later on. The problem: these nice, respectable trade magazines always seem to report it as being brand new, when in fact the online community is already calling them out on “old news”. It is a cycle that has gone on for a long time, and according to many websites, it has gone on too long.

On Sunday, Frosty over at Collider launched an official boycott of the trades, saying that his site will no longer be providing links, the currency of the internet, to stories taken from sites such as Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. He explained in his article that this will continue until things change (read: indefinitely) and independent movie websites are given credit for the work they are doing.

Late last night, our good friend El Mayimbe (or amo de la noticia sensacional de prensa as we call him around FSR HQ) at Latino Review launched his own official boycott, in support of his fellow web “bloggers” and in support of his own hard work. His article, titled Why both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter TOTALLY SUCK! is not only an entertaining read, but in it he does a wonderful job of articulating the entire problem. So instead of rehash the details, I will let you read it over there and come back. Don’t worry, I can wait.

Now I tell you all of those stories to tell you this one. We here at Film School Rejects have been, and will always be dedicated to bringing you the most interesting features, editorials and reviews on the web. And while we don’t fancy ourselves a big bad news site like our Crave Film Channel hombres ComingSoon.net or our a scoop factory like Latino Review, we do feel that it is important to stand united with our online brethren. Therefore, we are officially participating in the link-in boycott of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. In short, we just aren’t going to link to them anymore. In fact, we would have done it earlier had someone suggested it — we hate having to insert all over those extra <a href=”"> tags.

So until the trade rags give in (never) and force us to go back and start putting in those extra HTML tags again (not going to happen, as we are very lazy)… We say VIVA LA REVOLUCION!

Ghostbuster photo courtesy of NinjaWilson on DeviantArt

Read more articles by Neil Miller