What's sad is that people think I really give a rat's ass that I got something wrong. What's funny is that I admitted it almost instantly. And I was quick to put the blame on myself. I didn't vet the source properly, and in a hurry to try and get some news up ahead of everyone else at that point when SyFy was very young and still trying to establish itself, I made a mistake.
But some people with nothing better to do and their own vendetta against me like to trudge that same ol' same ol' story every time. There HAS to be SOMETHING new out there.
I personally think it's funny. And if that's the only time I've been duped in 10 years, knock on wood, then I think I'm doing pretty damn good.
Wow, didn't Brazeal admit almost instantly that he is to blame for the failure of FedConUSA ? And don't you tredge that same old story about Brazeal every chance you get ?
You might want to go read his meaculpa, if you can call it that. He pretends to take blame, but then shifts it to others. In fact, they were even blaming Chris McKeown.
And context says a lot. If you don't like context, then you might enjoy USA Today.
Isn't there something new out there for you to report on ? I think if it weren't for Brazeal you would have a dull life.
Yes ... I have posted what, four stories on SyFy Portal, on Brazeal in the last three years, and all of them in this past week because of a developing story with the collapse of a convention that has stars angry and attendees angry. But that's not newsworthy, I'm sure.
Although this time of year is slow for entertainment reporting ... but it's hardly the only thing we've been covering this week.
It does seem you have been all over every forum that you can find to voice your "old stories" to anyone who will listen to you.
Hardly the only one voicing them. It seems that there are a lot more doing it here, too.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Don't complain because people call you into account for your obvious vendetta against Brazeal.
I haven't. I've even taken the pot shots (see the moronic post above) ... but tell Tim I said hello!
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starship polaris said:
Of course, no one at CBS suffered the consequences of being aggressively and arrogantly wrong in that instance, did they? It's not like anyone lost a job or the credibility of the news organization with the public was in any way affected.
I noticed that of the several example provided you, you talked about just one. I like how selective memory works for you.
What I most enjoyed about the
various "Series V" foul-ups at SyFyWorld was the stridency with which they promoted themselves as mythbusters and "going the extra mile" to get the "truth." In fact they were being rightly treated as credulous fanboys by people who were easily feeding them pretty transparent bullshit (the "T'Pol" photo was a careless Photoshop job never designed to actually fool anyone, yet SyFyWorld declared
"... whoever created the fake did a great job. I examined it every way possible
to see if it was doctored, and I couldn't see anything that had it doctored" ).
That's great for you! Glad you weren't fooled by something!
SyFy Portal, and our predecessor SyFy World (which was a member of this very TrekNation network for the story you obsess about) are news and rumors sites, which means that we report on things many times that have not been confirmed. We are not the PR-arm of any studio or network.
Any rumor site has had hits and misses. That's part of the game, and something we work to try and let people know when they come to the site or read a rumors story. There are a number of factors that could make the story not come to fruition: The story could be wrong to begin with; the story was very early stage and was changed by those who have control of things like that; source could've misheard the report.
Despite that, of all the original rumors that SyFy Portal reports, we have ended up wrong less than 6 percent of the time, and that includes the whole T'Pol thing. That means 94 percent of the time we were correct, even when people were telling us we were full of shit.
I mean, I remember when we were reporting that SciFi Channel had picked up "Battlestar Galactica" as a series, a whole group of people were convinced we were not only making it up, but were trying to report not that a decision hadn't been made yet, but that SciFi Channel had passed. We were, obviously correct.
After the first season of "Jericho," since we have someone posting that seems to be a part of that movement, we reported that the show was about to be renewed. However, a week later, CBS decided to NOT renew it. At first we had egg on our face on that one, but then it was revealed a short time later that the show had been renewed, but then cancelled at the last minute.
We also had some very specific story details from the past 10 episodes of BSG, which we ended up being correct on nearly all of it. The only thing we stumbled on was that we said Cylon lines would be completely wiped out, but instead, they were
nearly wiped out.
I guess no one is perfect.
If one actually cares about accuracy of original or investigative reporting or is looking for "scoops," SyFyPortal is not a destination of choice. Most of what they do is either news aggregating - collecting stories from more aggressive and well-sourced sites - or posting reviews and columns of opinion. That's fine as far as it goes, but it's a mistake not to treat any story they "break" with far greater skepticism than similar reporting from sites like Trekmovie.com or even AICN.
AICN is actually perceived to be wrong more often than they are correct. I don't know if that is true, I've never studied the accuracy of their stories, but that is the perception I have heard.
Also, TrekMovie is a great site, but they aggregate news just as much as anyone else. They post original columns just as much as everyone else. But there's nothing wrong with that in my eyes, or thousands of other people's eyes -- but it does show the contradiction in your statement.
Just recently, SyFy Portal even moved rumor notifications to the TOP of a story, rather than the bottom. That was a result of reader feedback, something we listen to very intently.
I do take offense to being dealt a punch in regards to aggregating stories from other sources, or having opinion pieces and reviews. I took a look at a few other sites just a few minutes ago, and looked at their five most recent stories.
SciFi Wire, which has a full time news staff and the financial backing of NBC Universal, had two stories that were original reporting, a third story that came from a mass press release that everyone (including SyFy Portal) received about the Doomsday casting, and then two other stories from the trades: Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.
Dark Horizons, a site I have visited since almost their first day of existence, had five stories that were ALL aggregated from other sources, including MTV News, the trades and SlashFilm. I don't talk to Garth Franklin at anywhere near the same frequency we did several years ago because we both are busy busy busy, but I believe Garth might do the site full-time (although if I'm wrong, I will stand corrected).
TV Guide, with a full-time staff and a major corporate backing, had three original stories, although two of them were reviews/columns. They had the Smallville thing, but pulled that from a mass press release, and they announced the birth of a child for Jamie Lynn Spears, but picked that up from US Magazine.
TrekToday, which has a volunteer staff of I guess just T'Bonz (who I think is doing a great job, by the way) has five stories up, but all came from other sources including Newsarama, E! Online, TrekMovie and the trades.
This is just a snapshot so probably not the best representation ... but TrekMovie had five stories up, but were all reviews and columns.
SyFy Portal has five stories up (we won't update until this afternoon, however ... busy day) ... but one came from Michael Ausiello (the Doomsday piece, but we picked up Ausiello's scoop and didn't wait for the press release), two columns including one on the anniversary of DS9, an original story on FedCon, and a story we picked up from MediaWeek.
What this shows is not that any of these sites are bad -- quite the contrary. New aggregation is part of the business. Even sites with full-time news staffs aggregate. Maybe not as much, but they do.
Sites that you mentioned, like TrekMovie, also has columns, reviews and such. In fact, their most recent five stories are just that. Nothing wrong with that either.
By the way, these are sites that I very much enjoy (among others), whether they aggregate or not. I visit each of them every day. And it makes me sad that you feel so poorly about these sites, which have staffs who work very hard, many times for free.
So it sounds like the only person that has a vendetta or some ax to grind isn't me ... it's you.
I will not defend the site again. If people don't like to visit us, that's their decision, and I am not going to fault them for it. In fact, I would probably first ask them what they don't like about the site, and then see if those are issues we need to address.
There are a lot of independent news sites out there. I had TrekToday, TrekMovie and Dark Horizons above, but I also frequent other independent sites such as The TV Addict, TrekWeb and more. I communicate quite frequently with many of their webmasters, or whoever they have running their sites now (TrekToday and TrekWeb has owners who are no longer active in the editorial side, but that's OK ... these sites have been around for a LONG time and it's tough to keep doing this for years and years and years), and we all know what it's like to do all of this, to have any mistake out there for the whole world to see.
And many of us do all this for peanuts, if anything at all. SyFy Portal went commercial three years ago because I couldn't justify not only funding the whole site out of my own pocket, but spending close to 40 hours per week on it and not get something back. I also wanted us to have a marketing budget and a travel budget so that we COULD go and cover more events and have more original reporting.
While moving to commercial moved us away from the realm of being a "glorified fan site" as we originally billed ourselves, we have now been able to travel to more events like last year's SciFi Channel Digital Press Tour in Vancouver, the upcoming Comic-Con in San Diego and more. In fact, what's nice is that we're not limited by funds now, we're limited by the available time I have. But we are known to be reporting things almost instantly ... I carry my MacBook with me at events, and type away at 120 wpm and get stories up as soon as I can. If you visit the SciFi Channel Web site, there is a drinking game you can do with one of David Eick's blogs where it chronicles our visit to the Battlestar sets. For some reason, all of their B-roll is me sitting on the hangar deck of the Galactica typing away on my MacBook.
I am not going to defend SyFy Portal any further. If it were just me at the site, I would correct you where you were wrong, and go on my way. But we have a staff of 10 people ... when you unfairly disparage the site, you disparage them. They volunteer their time to try and bring news and thoughts and entertainment to thousands of readers every day.
Just like none of us should attack T'Bonz, Gustavo Leao, Anthony Pascale, and even people like Garth Franklin, Hercules and Patrick Lee and the people they have working on their teams, it's a bit harsh to attack us as well.
I tend to only get involved in message boards when the topic is something I feel I should be a part of the discussion. I also join message board conversations when I'm talked about or I'm invited to. One of the things that people commend us for all the time is that I AM accessible. People can e-mail me, and they can get a response back. They may not always like the response, but they know I will listen. They know I care, and in the end, that's all that matters to me.
SyFy Portal is almost to a revenue point where I could take it on full-time, or actually hire people on a freelance basis to cover more events for us. And we might start looking at doing that. But we won't change who we are -- advertising or not, we are still a glorified fan site that just happens to be run and maintained by journalists. We're not perfect, and even the best have been duped or have been wrong.
The difference with us, however, is we don't try to hide it. We don't bury it. In fact, you were able to pull up a cached story from seven years ago. You even were able to pick up an e-mail I sent to our mailing list seven years ago -- all which are freely available on the Web, and nothing that I have ever tried to hide.
Even seven years later, when that is the only thing you can throw at me, I still talk about it. I don't remember all the details of it, or how naive I was, or how busy I was (I guess I could go back and look at what I said), but I can tell you that I didn't blame anyone else. I didn't find a scapegoat. I didn't pretend to take the blame, and then pass it off to other things like El Nino or Al Vinci. I said, "I was wrong, I made a mistake, and we will do everything in our power to make sure it doesn't happen again."
And how many times did it happen again after that? Zero. After seven years, at least 6,000 posted stories, I kept my promise. I was able to come through. And we have a readership base that only continues to grow.
Sorry to everyone else for going a bit off-topic, but I'm done with this subject.
