I am sorry.

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Speaking historically, you absolutely correct that SF had a whole network of fan reviewers who would help get the word out about shows or books or movies to other fans. I think that is still true with a lot of SF and non-mainstream culture in general.

However, it is disingenuous to claim that we still exist in a world where fans can pass something around at a con or in a fanzine and that's enough. Back in the fanzine days, fan reviewers often did get the equivalent of screeners or review copies because they were in a friend network where stories got passed around. They weren't dealing with large Hollywood corporations. They weren't, as you point out, consumers in a relationship with large corporate producers. They were fans in relationships with other fans - quite often, they were creators dealing with other creators. There was no giant corporate infrastructure separating book creators from book buyers, as there is today between TV consumers and TV production houses.

While not all reviewers might view themselves as consumer advocates, I do see myself this way. I know that I am very lucky to spend my days reading books and watching movies for a living, and as a result I consider it an ethical duty to let consumers and fans know when I've discovered a story that's worth their hard-earned money and precious free time. I feel consumers are entitled to know when studios are trying to sell them crap, just as they are entitled to know when a small press with no publicity department has created something beautiful and worth tracking down.

These days, consumers and fans of science fiction have to wade through oceans of promotional materials and advertisements to find good stories. They need reviewers they can trust, who are ethical and thoughtfully evaluate stories, to help them look beyond the Michael Bay-style hype machines and find the good stuff.

And it's this kind of media-saturated, corporate environment where I think reviewers become consumer advocates. The tools of our trade are nothing more than advance copies of stories (screeners, review copies) and laptops. While it's true that people don't have to go to movies on opening night or watch TV shows when they air, many of us do. And those people, those consumers, deserve to have a legitimate evaluation of the story to read if they want.

I fully understand why the SciFi Channel did what it did with the screener copy, and in fact we spent some time today talking with a very nice and patient rep from the channel who discussed it with us. I do feel like my response was a little harsh, and we apologized for that. I also added an update to my post above, explaining that I now understand that TV screeners are incomplete more often than I had realized.

However, I do think that BSG has been off the air long enough that people really are looking to reviewers to decide if they want to reinvest in the show. Or whether they should invest in buying last season on DVD so they can catch up. The point is, just because a show has been on the air before doesn't mean consumers should automatically be expected to suck it up without any kind of critical evaluation. Consumers deserve better than that - they aren't automatons, and people stop or start watching shows all the time.

Maybe the answer is for critics to agree not to review incomplete episodes. Or maybe SciFi shouldn't have sent out anything more than a single scene from the show, if they were worried about people posting the episode on a file-sharing network. I don't know what the best solution is, honestly. But I think there has to be something better than this.

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Now, on to your comment. You make some interesting points. I still don't necessarily subscribe to your interpretation of reviewer as consumer advocate, but I understand your rationale, and can respect it. Maybe it's just that for me, the term "consumer advocate" is not one to be bandied around so lightly-when I hear that phrase, I think "This car is unsafe at any speeds, don't put your kids in it". "This show blows, don't watch it"? not so much.

I do think you've hit the nail on the head when you say:

"These days, consumers and fans of science fiction have to wade through oceans of promotional materials and advertisements to find good stories. They need reviewers they can trust, who are ethical and thoughtfully evaluate stories, to help them look beyond the Michael Bay-style hype machines and find the good stuff."

I agree completely. There is way too much shit out there, and it's good to have voices that you trust pointing you in the right direction. I don't see that as consumer advocacy, mind you, but that could very well just be semantics on my part-see above. I do see it as a curatorial and, well, critical (no pun intended) role within the media ecosystem. But to say that advance copies of stories are your tools of the trade, and are as essential as your laptop in order for you to fulfill that role is, once again, somewhat self-aggrandizing. If you are evaluating a consumer experience, you shouldn't expect to receive anything better than what the average consumer experiences. If you do receive something in advance, I think that, as I explained in my previous comment, it should be seen as a courtesy from the media producer, who is making your job easier-or not easier, really, but at least more efficient-than it would otherwise be.

In the particular case of BSG, where the show's been around and it has a reputation, but it's been gone for a while, I agree with you: there may be a component of the audience that needs to be convinced to come back to the show. But most of those consumers probably won't be convinced just by a few advance reviews. Former fans that have been burned are harder to bring back into the fold than people who have never been fans, and while an advance review or two may help in some cases, in my experience (having been in advertising for a number of years before working at Tor, and having been through my share of focus groups and read my share of consumer analysis reports), the effective communication strategy for dealing with recalcitrant prodigals is repetition of a simple core message over time, and, once more, word-of-mouth from friends. These, I think, are actually the driving factors in creating renewed curiosity in lapsed fans for the media property in question.

Speaking of word-of-mouth, I think we do still live "in a world where fans can pass something around at a con or in a fanzine and that's enough". Now more than ever we can rely on word-of-mouth like the fandom of old, but through much more efficient media: internet fora, social networks, and the like. We're no longer stuck with one or two reviewers writing for a large newspaper or glossy magazine decreeing that Something Is Good, You Should Go Buy It; we can ask our friends, or we can choose to come to places like io9, which caters specifically to the very niche that we're a part of. Hell, one of the descriptions we bandied about when developing Tor.com was "a really large, year-round con", and I think that applies to you guys as well.

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Come with me, Lassus, and we shall sit together and tell the kids to get off our lawn as we criticize critics. I'll drink my Metamucil while you tell me about this Rice chap...

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The networks/studios had a lot more control and were much more cut off back then. Reviewers didn't even get screeners of every episode. It was (attempted to be) controlled in the networks/studios favor to a much higher degree than nowadays, though I never heard of anyone getting cut off from contact for finding out something the studio didn't want out. Possibly b/c there were no web sites or viral video and so if you cut off a guy for being a good journalist, you'd lose all the promo possibilities for an entire area. The studios had to make nice with the guys (they were mostly guys back then, which has improved).

The reviewers worked a LOT harder to ferret out information the old-fashioned way. Developing sources, phone calls, faxes, the whole investigative journalist thing -- literally sometimes getting handed scripts in parking garages like Deep Throat! Overall, the good ones seemed to be less-accepting of just reprinting press releases, more journalistic, had better critical faculties and MUCH better standards of English prose.

And yes, MORE ethical than a lot of the ones are nowadays.

Sorry if I worded it wrong so you got completely the wrong end of the stick. This is why I'm not a writer.

But I wanted to give a glimpse of what things were like for those readers who are too young to remember life and criticism before the internet, and when NO quality TV shows worth watching were on cable networks.

(and the fact that there are so few truly LOCAL TV reviewers left, knowing their town's business and writing about it is a whole 'nother rant.)

*Although everyone knew wasn't no way, no how, the network was going to let anyone know Who Shot JR. Everyone had to wait for that. But the ending of M*A*S*H was a pretty open secret if you wanted to know.

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P.S. Back before everyone had a DVD player, screeners were much more time-consuming and expensive to send out. VHS tapes cost more to buy, much more to send (in both packaging and postage) and had to be copied in real time (maybe half real time? dunno) which took a lot of labor for someone to pop finished ones out and blank ones in.

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It's pretty breathtaking how quickly corporate America can go from "Demon Oppressors of All That Is Good" to "Unimpeachably Valiant Defenders of Artistic Integrity" around here.

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of course i'm not even going to watch the episode today, i hope to have time this weekend, but maybe because i'm not chomping on the bit, i don't see it the same way as other people.

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