I found two very talented editors who worked from morning Eastern time to late afternoon Pacific time. Every story went through them before being published. They were fantastic.
They also slowed the publishing process to a screeching near-halt. And, even more importantly: No. One. Cared.
Hiring them was part of a larger, and ultimately failed, experiment to bring magazine-style editing and quality control to tech blogging. We would write fewer, better stories. Our copy would gleam. Readers would swoon.
It was a train wreck. Traffic plummeted. By half. Literally, month-to-month traffic cut in half. As we tried to right the sinking ship the first thing I did was fire the copyeditors. During the eight-or-so months they worked for us no one had ever commented on our clean copy. No one told us they came to our site because we had fewer typos than TechCruch. I saw the difference. It’s not that readers didn’t, they just didn’t care.
Abraham Wyatt argues that websites don’t need copy editors.
I feel like we keep seeing more proof that the Internet en masse punishes that which we’d traditionally describe as “good journalism.” I’m still trying to work out if that means that it’s not worth trying at all, or merely that no-one’s discovered the right model yet.
Have you seen House of Cards, and if so what do you think of it?
Midway through the second season as I type.
I like it – I found myself OD’ing on the first season, and setting it aside about halfway through before returning and hungrily devouring the rest of it. This second season is… interesting?
It feels like there’s been a shift that the writers haven’t quite managed to come to terms with, with Frank in the VP seat. There’s no throughline like the Russo plot of the first season, and Frank’s new duties mean that he seems too removed from the tightly focused scrum of party politics the year before.
Tonally, it feels like it’s lurched more towards dark comedy – while I admired the “You probably think I’ve forgotten about you” monologue at the end of the first episode, everything feels a little bit more cartoonish this time around, and it was hardly the least cartoonish show to begin with.
Overall, I like it, and I’m going to keep watching. But this year feels problematic in a way that the first didn’t.
SAVAGE WOLVERINE 19
ISSUE # 19 – Gail Simone (W) • TBA (A)
COVERS BY Shane Davis
ISSUE #19 –
• He’s the best there is at what he does – but what if he has a bad day?
• Logan collides head first with some bad luck on the worst possible day. Can Jubilee lend a hand?
• It’s Wolverine’s no good, very bad, extremely awful day by Gail Simone (Batgirl) and Somebody!
“By Gail Simone (Batgirl) and Somebody!”
Yes, I wonder why artists may feel like they’re being devalued by the Big Two these days. I can’t quite put my finger on it.
(From here.)
so when will the next episode of the wait what podcast will come out ? its one of the best parts of my week I make an effort not to miss ^_^ also who do you think would win in an Miss Universe body building contest between She-Dragon or Joanna Cargill ? the winner gets to Fight take Debra Whitman on a Date ?
If Vision is in Avengers 2 and does not cry will you demand your money back?
No, because it’ll leave Paul Bettany something to do in the sequel.
More importantly, if Vision and Scarlet Witch don’t start flirting in this movie, I’ll – okay, I’ll actually be a little relieved, considering that Bettany’s something like 20 years older than Elizabeth Olsen. Damn you for ruining my Englehart wishes for the movies, Marvel Studios!
The books spotlighted for the campaign are FBP, Coffin Hill, Brother Lono, Trillum, The Wake, and Hinterkind. According to ad copy, there will be a $250,000 marketing campaign including ads in the LA Times (Hero Complex), IGN, NY Times.com, Huffington Post The Onion/AV Club, Facebook (Hello Brett Schenker), Goodreads and Romantic Times.
Romantic Times? I can’t wait to see how The Wake and Brother Lono are going to be advertised there.
From here.
The “Point NOW” issues take matters even further. A Point NOW issue, it seems, is what a title gets when even Marvel has too much shame to relaunch it. The issue is officially numbered something like #20.NOW, and it gets a bloody great #1 on the cover, to signify… what exactly? The solicitations for these comics offer unexplained gibberish such as “Avengers #24.NOW = Avengers #1 in all-new Marvel Now”. The reasonable reader, groping for meaning in this syntactic wilderness, might be forgiven for assuming that a Point NOW issue is at least a jumping on point of some description.
Such a reader might be surprised by this week’s two offerings. Guardians of the Galaxy #11.NOW boasts a huge #1 in the top right hand corner, but the story within is “The Trial of Jean Grey”, part 2. Yes, it’s a crossover with All-New X-Men, so it’s the first chapter to appear in Guardians. And yes, the first two chapters could technically be read in either order, since they show how the two different teams got to the same point. That’s a structure Bendis did to death in his Avengers events, though it makes more sense here, spread across two different titles. Even so, the bottom line is that it is the second part of the story to appear, and Marvel have stuck a #1 on the cover.
This is nothing compared to X-Men #10.NOW, which is billed as “Ghosts, part 1″, despite being quite plainly the continuation of the Arkela/Sisterhood storyline that began in issue #7. The issue opens with the resolution of mid-story cliffhangers from the previous issue, principally Monet having charged into battle alone and been beaten down by the villains. In the upcoming trade paperback edition, this issue will be “Muertas, part 4 of 6″. And even that storyline is a sequel to the original Arkela story from issues #1-3.
Nobody could describe this comic as the first issue of anything, however generously and broadly that concept is defined. It is, in reality, a middle chapter of a lengthy storyline. So why does it have a big #1 on the cover?
Paul O’Brien takes on Marvel’s love of renumbering (and inventing non-number numbers).
Directed by Joss Whedon (“Marvel’s The Avengers”), the film returns its iconic cast, including Robert Downey Jr. (“Iron Man 3,” “Marvel’s The Avengers”) as Tony Stark/Iron Man along with Chris Hemsworth (“Thor: The Dark World,” “Marvel’s The Avengers”) as Thor, Mark Ruffalo (“Marvel’s The Avengers,” “Now You See Me”) as Hulk, Chris Evans (“Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” “Marvel’s The Avengers”) as Captain America, Scarlett Johansson (“Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” “Marvel’s The Avengers”) as Black Widow, Jeremy Renner (“American Hustle,” “Marvel’s The Avengers,”) as Hawkeye, and Samuel L. Jackson (“Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” “Marvel’s The Avengers”) as Nick Fury. Joining the cast are Aaron Taylor-Johnson (“Godzilla,” “Kick Ass 2”) as Quicksilver, Elizabeth Olsen (“Godzilla”) as Scarlet Witch and James Spader (“The Blacklist,” “Lincoln”) as Ultron.
Yes, that doesn’t sound like a movie with far too many main characters at all. (Not listed: the already announced Paul Bettany as Jarvis and Thomas Kretschmann as Baron Von Strucker, as well as the rumored Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill, Clark Gregg as Agent Coulson and Don Cheadle as Iron Patriot/War Machine).
(From Marvel PR email about Avengers: Age of Ultron.)