Reviewerfesto continu`d - Radical departures.

Seeing as the Reviewerfesto debates continue to rage on, I thought I would post a little response to Gabe Chouinard's latest idea (even if he did call me 'John' rather than 'Jonathan') .  On September 23, Gabe suggested:

"And what if I were to use that review site to outline this "street-level criticism" that I'm blathering about? I mean, Urban Drift, street-level criticism... seems a good match, eh?

And what if I were to solicit reviews from the various reviewers that I dig, who might be capable of (or even already) producing this style of critical reviews?"

Now, on the one hand, this is an excellent idea because it's one thing to bitch about the standards of online reviewing but it's something else to actually try and do something about it.  In this case, I understand him to be suggesting that he turn his Urban Drift site into a review site which has tight editorial controls on the style and content of the reviews that it publishes.

My problem with this idea is that there are already loads of review sites out there and that by starting a new review site from scratch he'd not only be opening up a can of administrative whoop-ass on himself he'd also be competing with the other sites for the attentions of the better writers (among whom I wouldn't class myself quite yet obviously).

Indeed, speaking purely from personal experience and from talking to other reviewers, once you reach a certain level of output and experience, you generally develop a hierarchy of preferences when it comes to time (in the shape of accepting commissions) or copy (when it comes to reviews you've written off your own bat).  Some sites pay more, other sites have more prestige and some sites you might just personally want to support.  The point is that any new site entering the fray will have to compete with the likes of Strange Horizons,  the SF site and the New York Review of Science Fiction for the affections of good reviewers.  This isn't to say that such a battle is impossible to win (for starters I think the SF site's position isn't as strong as it was even a year ago) but it is a long and difficult way of addressing the problem.

Having devoted some thought to the problem, I actually think that Gabe's solution isn't radical enough. 

Somewhere in the virtual rats nest of articles and comments surrounding this idea, someone (I think it was Niall Harrison) suggested a website whereby different reviewers would be monitored over time like an equivalent of Private Eye's hackwatch.  The idea presumably being that if you post nothing but glowing reviews, someone somewhere should take note and bear that in mind about your reviews in the future.  This idea too has some merit to it but it seems like a lot of analytical and cross-referencing work.

I suggest that the two ideas be combined.

If you look at websites like Slashdot, Del.icio.us and Digg, you see what constitutes a process of filtering; someone puts up an interesting argument or video or blog-post and it gets reported to these filter websites.  Then the audiences or moderators either squish them or support them, thereby bringing the posts to a wider audience and saving that wider audience from having to traipse round dozens of blogs and websites before getting the news.

Now, much has been made of this quintessentially web 2.0 process of mass editing but I think the most interesting aspect of the phenomenon is that these websites serve as filters that catch what might otherwise be missed and brings them to the attention of a wider audience.  My proposal is that something similar be set up for Sci-fi reviews.

There are loads of different websites whose quality vary from author to author and from review to review.  If we, as a community of reviewers, have such a good idea of what constitutes a good review, why not put together a website that systematically links to all the good reviews?  the site would serve as a combination of a Digg/Boing Boing filtration site and a Rotten Tomatoes-style review collection.

That way, you wouldn't have to pay reviewers, you wouldn't have to organise sending books out to people and you wouldn't have to compete with the established sites.  all you'd do is read these different sites and draw attention to those reviews that do a really good job. 

So good writers wouldn't just get the prestige of being published by big sites, they'd also get the added prestige of being linked by an even more demanding meta-site.  It could even serve to encourage new reviewers who maybe don't have the confidence to write for the really big sites (a group I do identify myself as being a member of).

All you'd need is a blog, a singular set of principles as to what constitutes a good review and people who read lots of reviews across different sites.

Comments

[Niall Harrison]

"Somewhere in the virtual rats nest of articles and comments surrounding this idea, someone (I think it was Niall Harrison) suggested a website whereby different reviewers would be monitored over time like an equivalent of Private Eye's hackwatch"

Not me, guv. I just pointed it out. The discussion is on Lucius Shepard's message board.

www.nightshadebooks.com/discus/messages/32/6960.html?1158908449#POST112808

As proposed, it could work, but it could also just generate slapfights, and I personally wouldn't want to be involved; too much of a quis custodiet ipsos custodes vibe for my taste. I like your group rating system better. I think you'd need a fairly large pool of people with the authority to recommend reviews/vote on others' recommendations, but that shouldn't be too hard.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

I stand corrected on the source. I simply couldn't find the post when I went looking for it.

Well yes, anytime anyone sets themselves up as arbiters of taste then you have a power dynamic that's open to abuse but ultimately the intellectual market would make it pretty clear how reliable the tastes of the "watchers" were.

A Digg-style system would work quite a bit better but it would require some coding as I don't think the software's freely available (unlike the wiki stuff that allows anyone to set up one).

It might be worth looking into though.