Pajiba

I take it in the butt for money. Does that make me a whore?

This was a fascinating read, Dustin. The fact that Pajiba is so atypical and doesn't kiss the ass of every filmmaker and studio is one of the main reasons I've been an avid reader of the site for so many years.

Great read, Dustin.

These type of shananagins aren't limited to movie reviews and movie bloggers. There have been a few similar type "scandals" regarding video game reviews, where publishers have threatened to pull adveritising from sites if there is a negative review or if a negative review wasn't taken down or revised.

Sadly, it also happens in good old traditional media as well. Just recently here, in Detroit, the automotive critic for the Detroit News wrote a review of the new Chrysler 200, the one in that Eminem "Imported From Detroit" commercial. The guy ripped the car something fierce in his review. After the review was published in the paper copy, the Detroit News received some serious flak from an advertiser, beleived to be a large Chrysler dealership. In response to the complaint, the Detroit News edited the on-line version of the review to take out some of the more negative comments. The critic resigned from the Detroit News this week.

Is there going to be video or transcripts of the above mentioned panels? I would love to check them out.

Meh it doesn't make much difference either way. You constantly see movies killed by critics do awesome at the box office. The audience is 80% influenced by trailers and marketing campaign 15% by word of mouth from friends and actual real people they know and the minority who actually cares about what some critic says most of the time simply check out rotten tomatoes.

The whole bs with critics is mostly about the studio and their pride and crap like this

There doesn't seem to be anything really beneficial to having studio connections when it comes to reviewing. All you need is to see the movie, write a review and find somewhere that will publish it.

The studio connections exist to make people feel special or like 'blogging celebrities'. Everyone wants to be on the cover, no one wants to be the guy who turns in good work who no one recognizes on the street.

Having never been a tech of movie blogger, I still assumed that receiving letters and emails from studios - suggesting the same things here - was common.

Isn't that a publicist or media professional supposed to do? Attempt to control the message their studio or production company wants told? I think that's the key word here: attempt

I agree that there is certain to be a lot of conflicts of interest here, but hasn't that always been the case, from Rex Reed to Rotten Tomatoes? Wouldn't the publicist or studio rep be railed for NOT trying to mitigate the negative, for NOT doing their job, especially if their film isn't as good as one would hope?

Oh, good ol' journalism and your ethic issues... I should have known better when I started in it...

Oh, good ol' "science" of marketing... You'll never catch a break and you sure as hell don't deserve it...

Protoguy, that's true - it's a publicist's job to try to massage the message, but really...what are they gonna do? Start making better movies instead? Pshaw!

I'm frankly amazed they don't offer movie menu consultants at this point. Catered film soup, based upon your easy 4-step psych profile!

(Oooh! Fun! I LOVE a quiz about me! Look, all the rom-com, non-dom, gore-free, lite profanity crew are here today! Will it be Jenny from the block, or Jenny from the Anistanny? We'll call it, I Hate Husband Stealers XXVI.)

Just now weighing in on this. One of the things that bothered me about Paul Carr's indignation was this line:

Actually, Patricia, you only have two loyalties: one is to your readers and one is to the company that signs your paychecks. That’s it.

If you have a loyalty to your company and the company line is "be nice to the advertisers," then, unfortunately, you have to toe the line occasionally, if you want that financial support. The money part is what so many ideologues miss on this. Money is THE motivator and it always will be. So, it's okay to should "down with The Man" but just remember where your paycheck comes from. And, who wants to be looking for work in this economy. As a goddamned writer/editor, no less!

Is there going to be video or transcripts of the above mentioned panels? I would love to check them out.

I was actually curious about that too, so I checked Carlson's blog. He said he wasn't sure if an official video would be put online, but had a clip from the Blogger Centipede panel.

fucking whores! (see what i did there?)

I just saw this post now and since my name is mentioned I thought I'd respond. First off -- and I say this in my quote despite what Rowles still wants to suggest -- we have never "toned down" content (be it a review, news post or whatever)because of a studio request, and that goes for everyone on my team as well.

I'm not going to lie and say studios don't request that sort of thing from time to time (though it's definitely rare cases, and the big studios haven't done so in a real long time -- it's just the nature of working with publicists who only want nice things written about their products) -- but the one thing I've always respected about Moviefone is that they've never forced us to change a thing, and 99% of the time they tell the studio to back off before even coming to us. In cases when it has come to us, we've always stood behind our writers 100% and the studio -- as well as Moviefone -- has always backed off. I've never been afraid of losing my job when defending the integrity of the site. And if I was, it wouldn't be a site I'd be working on for very long.

Moviefone -- as corporate as they may seem -- has always gone to bat for Cinematical, and in the 4 years I've been editor, I've never felt compromised and neither have any of our writers.

I can't speak for other sites, but that's how we've worked it at Cinematical -- though we spend a lot more of our time these days producing original content so our contact with studios and publicists has been limited.

That's how I prefer it, and I'd love to see more sites -- whoa, pop-up ad whoring out Lego Star Wars as I type my comment -- follow suit.

This is why I continue to read this site. Keep up the good work.

Whoa, shit just got real. I just want to send my appreciation to Dustin to continuing to discuss this issue which I knew very little about. I am a bit fuzzy on Todd's logic in his critique of Dustin's post. He says that Dustin shouldn't call out website and practices that he feels are troubling because by doing so he only draws more attention to those sites allowing them to grow in popularity and to continue to exist. Basically, we shouldn't call out things that we think are unethical because in doing so we draw attention to those things and make them more popular. That is completely ludicrous. If we didn’t draw attention to injustices or ethical violations then no one would know about them, the world would never change, and the unethical practitioners could continue what they are doing unchecked. Shedding light on potential ethical concerns can make us think more and puts pressure on people to change those practices. In this case, it seems that the publicity surrounding the leaked moviephone email, the SXSW panel, and even Dustin’s blog post here have caused the public to think more about the blogs and reviews they are consuming, and importantly, it has also caused other blog outlets (like the two guys posting above) to evaluate and shore up their own practices. That seems to me like a good thing.

To the two commenters who responded to my earlier comment - fair enough; if you or this site thinks it serves some greater social or ethical purpose to write incendiary, misinformed and worst of all misdirected editorials in order to call attention to what you or they call questionable practices, then have at it. But the extrapolation of logic in the above article is intellectually dubious and irresponsible: you quote Davis and then respond saying, "How many critics are going to allow that pressure to influence their reviews out of fear of having their access withheld?" Your indictment of all of the writers of Moviefone based on their editors being asked to change something by the studios is disingenuous at best. It would be like saying, in reference to Pajiba, "hmm, because there's a Herbal Essences drop-down ad on this page, and earlier, a Lego Star Wars ad, it is inevitable that this site will compromise its editorial integrity, if it hasn't already sold out completely;" to think that all web sites are not in some way driven by advertising and/or external influence is naive, but to suggest that to engage at any level with those external forces inextricably compromises that site's editorial integrity is myopic, and willfully oblivious to oneself. As a working journalist for over ten years who has written for more than 20 different online and print outlets, I can attest that I have NEVER at any site for which I've ever worked, including Moviefone/ Cinematical, been contacted either by my editors or the studios to change any content I've ever contributed, nor has that content ever been changed without my consent.

Nevertheless, if I am considered a whore and a sellout because I contribute to a site that has been contacted by the studios to even consider altering the content of another site my site's parent company owes, there's nothing I can do about that. But standing on a principle that has never been called into question either personally or professionally is self-glorification, and further, pointless marytrdom, and hopefully you'll forgive me for prioritizing paying my bills and doing work which has never been compromised over adhering to an ethical standard which this site - the folks who are trying to define it - do not live up to themselves.

Todd Gilchrist -- It's our policy not to respond to angry commenters because typically it will result in a neverending back-and-forth pissing match (which is what happened, I believe, on a Edward Champion piece you were involved in a couple of months ago). But here goes: I have a lot of respect for many of the writers over at Cinematical. Some of my favorite writers are there, and a couple of guys who write for Cinematical have also written here. It's not any of the individual writers I take issue with, and I don't think any of them individually "suck." It's the culture. It's the lack of transparency. It's the way in which AOL/Moviefone seems to operate.

The post above was built on this foundation: A) Erik Davis' comment: "Naturally it is pretty common for studios to at least ask to tone down something that’s particularly negative — especially if they’ve given you special access (real early screening etc) to that movie." That's what publicists do, right? The average reader may not know that, but it's in a publicists' job description. Fine. But B) the Moviefone's Editor in Chief's demonstrated practice of passing along messages from the studio to the writers, and C) her own statement to the effect that it's in Moviefone/Cinematical's best interest to remain on good terms with the studio.

Anyone with any common sense would logically make the connection that I made. If I had a boss that had passed along a note to me from the studio and said, "You don't have to change anything, but it's in our best interests to remain on good terms with the studio," some people might feel undue pressure to please, if not the studio, then at least their employer.

Your pop-up ad analogy is appropriate. If a specific advertiser had sent along a note to me suggesting that I tone down the rhetoric about a particular product being advertised (say, Herbal Essences shampoo), and if I'd made a practice of passing along those notes to my writers saying, "It's in our best interest to remain on good terms with Herbal Essences" then I could see the logic of your argument. But we have no contact with individual advertisers. We have no relationships with any advertisers. We sign a contract with an ad network; they give us a piece of code and we install it. Each month, they send us a check. That's the extent of our relationship -- for better or worse, we have no say in what advertisements run on this site. The drawback to not working for a place like AOL/Moviefone is that we don't have an ad sales team; the ad networks run whatever the hell they want to run, and we have no say, although I do often find it comical when an ad for a movie ends up running alongside a review we wrote that skewers that movie.

I'm not sure where the idea that we're being hypocritical in this respect comes from. There's a lot of find fault with on this site, I'm first to admit, but ethics is not one of them. I took plenty of ethics courses in both journalism and law school, and was the managing editor of a print publishing house before starting Pajiba, and I've taken the ethical standards from those places and applied them to the best of my ability here.

And why am I calling out these practices? Because nobody else will. How many readers know what's going on behind the scenes? I didn't know, and I work in the industry, albeit in a different way than most of our colleagues. I think transparency is important and for our readers, I want to draw a distinction between what we do and what other sites do, whether they care or not (and typically, our readers do not care about inside baseball, but they often don't care a lot about festival reviews of movies they've never heard of, either. That doesn't stop us from running them).

And Cole: Thanks for the comment, man. And you're right -- our readers don't care that much about inter-site drama, either. But I care about ethics, and I'm a self-righteous prick when it comes to ethics. So I like to write about it because it matters to me. But I'll also say this: The one time I can ever remember being jealous that we were not involved in the publicist game was when FSR interview Steven Moffat. That stung.

To the question about whether I could stay neutral? Honestly, I don't know. I know that a lot -- maybe most -- of you guys are perfectly capable of straddling that line. But I know that I can be an asshole online, but in real life, I don't like to disappoint people. Most of my writers don't give a shit one way or another (to their credit), but the way I write, I'd probably feel weird about dealing with the intermediary between me and the guy I just wished to die in a tire fire in a review. That would feel awkward and I certainly wouldn't want to interview him afterwards. And if someone sent me an exclusive poster, I'd probably feel shitty about saying, "Here's our exclusive new poster for Sucker Punch -- man, that movie looks like complete ass!" I get the feeling that some sites wouldn't get as many exclusives if they were a little more honest in their coverage of even marketing materials.

Again, I'm not trying to attack anyone personally (here, at least) although there are some that are easy targets (and anyone that reads movie blogs know who those people are). I'm taking issue with the culture, the direction, and the general relationships between studio, employer, and writer, and the many conflicts of interest that abound.

You spelled "Moviefone" incorrectly in the first sentence of this article, which is strange because you spent a lot of time on slamming said business. I wanted to be honest and tell you.

Devin, your suggestion that the site lacks integrity or that Dustin's position is hypocritical because the site runs ads smacks of desperation to defend yourself. Nobody is trying to say that a website shouldn't try to earn some scratch. But hosting an ad that one has no control over, as explained in the comment just before yours, is vastly different from the issues discussed here and on the panels - the question of the pros and cons of access - and you (should) know it.

Of course, you're also the guy who said you wouldn't review a small film you didn't like because it would be "shitting on the filmmaker." That not only smacks of its own hypocrisy as to your credibility, but also shows a lack of depth to your critical facility, if you think that the only type of negative review is one that shits on the movie. But maybe that's something you learned on one of your previous set visits in which case, my bad.

game, set, match, John Campea.

Sadly, it also happens in good old traditional media as well. Just recently here, in Detroit, the automotive critic for the Detroit News wrote a review of the new Chrysler 200, the one in that Eminem "Imported From Detroit" commercial. The guy ripped the car something fierce in his review. After the review was published in the paper copy, the Detroit News received some serious flak from an advertiser, beleived to be a large Chrysler dealership. In response to the complaint, the Detroit News edited the on-line version of the review to take out some of the more negative comments. The critic resigned from the Detroit News this week.
Posted by: Forbiddendonut at March 17, 2011 3:42 PM