Why I (Mostly) Quit Writing on the Internet: Hit-Baiting, Churnalism and Reactionary Bollocks

At the start of the year I said that, at some point in the future, I might write a post here about how I fell out of love with wanting to be a full-time movie critic/"journalist" and why I basically stopped maintaining this blog with anything like the frequency of the first two years. I hadn't bothered to do so to date because that's obviously a very self-indulgent thing to do, even by blogging standards, and - quite honestly - who cares about why I decide to do anything? Yet over the past couple of days, in the run-up to the (in gamer circles) highly anticipated release of Grand Theft Auto V, I've started receiving (not entirely unjustified) negative comments on Twitter and elsewhere about an article I wrote on the game for a reasonably widely-read pop-culture website nearly two years ago - which people are obviously coming across on Google now that the game is a hot topic once again.

Basically, I wrote a self-consciously inflammatory piece about the upcoming game long before any footage or screenshots of it had been released (a fairly douchey thing to do, I know), basically outlining a series of flimsy, uninformed and troll-baiting reasons why it would be terrible. I'll get around to explaining why in a moment, because that's sort of the most important part of this whole saga.

That article, which solicited (arguably deservedly, in this instance) typically morale-boosting comments like "wow. That's the worst article I've ever read", was not entirely motivated by snarky cynicism as I originally conceived it: at first I was genuinely interested in having a reasonable discussion about how I feared growing negative feeling about GTA IV, which (somewhat against the grain of fandom) I like and consider a huge step forward for the series, could lead to developer Rockstar taking a backwards step, just as their best-selling series had started to mature. I worried we'd see something more shallow, less focussed and a return to the kind of knock-about, irreverent shenanigans of earlier games in the series. This was me post-The Dark Knight but before The Dark Knight Rises: when the idea of something being dark and grounded had more currency for me than it does now, trite as it's become. But, if I'm honest, I always knew GTA V would turn out to be a polished, entertaining product and that it'd probably be a great game well worth looking forward to.

The finished game, out this month, may or may not have ended up like I feared, though I'm sure it's a lot of fun regardless. (To be honest, I don't really have time to play games to the extent that I used to and don't really care one way or the other about GTA V.) But the article could have been, in theory, a reasonable piece of commentary saying "I fear [X], but on the other hand [Y]". The troll-baiting snarkyness came from trying to be something I'm not: it came from pressure to attract those all-important "hits" that generate the ad revenue necessary for website owners to make money. Which had just become my problem for the first time.

You see in the run-up to writing that article I had gone from working for the site completely for free - as many young writers, hungry for opportunity are happy/compelled by a penny-pinching industry to do - to being made a sort of sub-editor told that I stood to make X-hundred numbers of pounds per week depending on the number of hits I attracted to the site. At first I attempted to meet this responsibility as I'd always naively imagined it: idealistically commissioning what (I thought) were "worthy" articles about film-making and wider pop-culture (as per the remit of the site). Mostly celebratory, labour-of-love stuff about the wide array of things the site's huge pool of (volunteer) writers were passionate about, from comic books to arthouse movies to sport.

Alas, these things weren't at all compatible with an economic model based around attracting hits via search engines and, for one miserable week, I was spending from 8am to 10pm hunched over the computer with little to show for it - creatively or fiscally. It was an uphill struggle to get good quality work on that site (from people working for free), not made any easier by the fact that new content arrived so fast it tended to push less popular items off the front page within an hour or so of publication - quickly dooming less bombastic pieces to the archive.

In short: "10 Reasons Why [X] Will Suck" is worth more to such a site than something more nuanced and reasonable. If you wonder why online discourse is frequently so antagonistic and perpetually ALL-CAPS shouty, the blame doesn't lie solely with angry readers, hatefully abusing their anonymity: editors encourage articles that solicit this response because they get people talking. Because people share them on Facebook and Tweet about them and thus attract more hits, bringing in more revenue. Navin R. Johnson came to a similar realisation in 'The Jerk'.

Hence the reasonable article I originally planned on never appeared. It didn't have a title that would work with Google or anything like enough punchy bullet-points to sustain the casual engagement of the imagined skim-reading public. To be clear: I'm not blaming this on the editor/site owner at all. The article was my idea. I pitched it and I ultimately made it sensationalist crap. But I did so because I was worried about getting enough hits to get paid. Volume of traffic is what counts and not the quality of it. To put it into context, so you don't assume I'm a money-grabbing-shyster who'd do anything for a quick buck, the sort of articles I like to write frequently attracted only a couple of hundred hits each.

These were, quite often, interviews with directors and actors which required hours of preparation, travel up to London, then several more hours transcribing words from a scratchy dictaphone (not fun at all), before then writing and formatting a finished article. And then you get a few hundred hits if you're lucky - at least on the site I wrote for (we're not talking The Guardian here), which was at that time dominated by share-friendly list articles proclaiming the "10 best this" and "100 worst that". In contrast my terrible article on GTA V currently has several hundred thousand views, over a hundred comments and lots of all-important "re-Tweets" and "shares". These are stats which make me sad about the state of online journalism and made me increasingly reluctant to want to devote much more of my life to it, because they actually highlight an existing disincentive to spending the time it takes producing work of quality.

Be honest: if your income was directly linked to how many hits you attracted, would you spend a considerable part of your working week posting an interview with Werner Herzog or Noah Baumbach that ten people care about, or would you spend the equivalent time bashing out a dozen terrible list articles that will each attract several hundred times that of an interview and take minimal time/brain power to write (at least when done badly by me)? It's that question I didn't want to have to answer any more, basically.

Now the circumstances leading up to the creation of my article, which was merely lazy and cynical rather than outright offensive, weren't the only reason I stopped wanting to write in this field on anything like a professional day-to-day basis. I also didn't appreciate being asked to effectively re-type other site's news stories, which - alongside lists - was part of that site's bread and butter in the absence of any actual investigative journalists. The embarrassing and ethically questionable practice I've seen described as "churnalism". Then there was the day, shortly before I left, that I received a mass e-mail asking for submissions from the writing pool for an article about the "top 100 babes" or something similar. Which is gross.

But probably the worst thing I came across was during the London riots. As they unfolded live on TV - as several decades of disenfranchisement of the inner-city poor and ethnic minorities created a sorry, pointlessly destructive spectacle of raw human ugliness - I was horrified (not a word I use here lightly) when one of the site's owners excitedly sent round an e-mail soliciting articles about the best weapons to use on rioters (I seem to remember tear gas was a suggestion), hoping to cash-in quickly on the turmoil. I can imagine the same guy suggesting an article with the title "10 Weapons We're Excited To See Dropped On Damascus!" That I didn't quit writing for them that instant remains a source of shame, but you're always reluctant to burn professional bridges when you're just starting out and I was grateful for many of the opportunities the site had given me in the past. I suppose I'm bridge-burning right now, though I've tried to do so without causing undue embarrassment or offence to anybody involved.

So yeah, I wrote a stupid article about something I didn't care that strongly about in an attempt to impress my boss, earn some money and subsidise dead-end articles about things I actually do care about. It's not something I'm proud of, but at least I stopped doing it very quickly and I haven't done it again since. Now you know why I fell out of love with doing this stuff. I hope it was worth your time! Thanks for reading.

What is Film Criticism For?

I don't really know what film criticism is "for" - other than the obvious, if facetious, response: "good movies". Though I was thinking about it (it was troubling me actually) and fancied throwing around some ideas here in the hope of coming to terms with the question.

One thought is that criticism is supposed to function as objective, empirical analysis which hopes to distinguish the worthwhile from the rest in the name of history. Is this critic in service of what might be termed "the canon", keeping it in order like some kind of cultural clerk? I don't know if true "objectivity" is possible, let alone desirable, in a critic, though, judging by the number of people who angrily rail against reviewer "bias" on internet message boards, it may be that many see dedication to such an emotionless approach as a critic's solemn duty.

Akin to that definition, but slightly different, is the popular assumption that art criticism exists as nothing more than a form of consumer advice: a way of sorting which novels, CDs of theatre tickets are worth paying for - and which are not. Film criticism may even be thought of as an extension of advertising. A bad critic might be one who gets it "wrong" too often, advising people to see things they then consistently fail to enjoy and who dislikes all the things that prove most popular.

It doesn't suit my voice, as becomes clear when I find myself ending reviews in a way that suggests a direct dialogue with a concerned investor, writing closing statements along the lines of: "if you like [insert genre] then it's certainly worth seeing" or "it's got plenty to find fault with, but it's the best on offer at the multiplex right now". At least when I do it, these types of endings highlight a failure of the imagination, providing me with a convenient way of summarising what has gone before without too much effort or skill. However, the best of these types of critics - who can do this with charm and authority - are by far the most popular, recognisable and beloved.



Generally (and conveniently) I prefer to see criticism as an end in itself. And, far from having a duty of care towards an imagined readership, perhaps reviewing should be about inciting a discussion amongst those who have already chosen to engage with a novel/CD/film? It could be that the best criticism is about providing a strong viewpoint which causes others to consider their own position on a given work and transform previously vague feelings into fully formed ideas.

Indeed, it might be termed an act of pomposity to aim to tell readers what to do, as if they were aimless sheep looking for a shepherd. I often feel embarrassed to hear that I've persuaded anybody to see or not see a movie. I immediately worry that I've prevented them from doing something they might otherwise have enjoyed, or that I have tricked them into sitting through something terribly dull. (Though I'm aware that this reaction is potentially quite patronising.)

One thing I am certain of is that I don't enjoy disliking anything very much. I've written lots of negative reviews over the last year and, at their worst, they are predictable demolitions of known turkeys, such as 'Sex & the City 2'. They never fill me with joy to write, especially as I consider the possible bursting impact I could have on somebody else's hard-earned happiness bubble.

I've come to admire the principle of the great Cahiers Du Cinema editor André Bazin, who preferred his writers to review only those films they enjoyed - calling it "appreciative criticism". For one thing, I like the way this approach is tacitly an even worse rebuke for a bad movie than an explicitly bad review - suggesting that an ignored movie is beneath discussion. But mainly I like how good-natured it seems and how good it must feel, as a writer, to concentrate on the positive.



If you are expressing your love of something, you are bulletproof. Even if everyone else thinks the film in question is naff, nobody reasonable is likely to shove a metaphorical turd through your letterbox. In contrast, when you criticise a film's score, you might get an e-mail from the crestfallen composer, and when you tear apart a small movie, you might find an angry letter from the director awaits you. Both these things have happened to me and they aren't pleasant to say the least. Not because I don't stand by what I write, or because I am allergic to criticism of my own work, but because you really don't set out to hurt a person's feelings. I assume that everyone is basically probably quite nice, so I never want to think I'm making a personal attack - though it must seem that way to someone who has poured considerable time and effort into their art. I have some sympathy with that point of view.

I'd follow Mr. Bazin's noble example and stop writing negative reviews tomorrow, only it would be much harder to fill the "pages" of this blog if I took that high road. As with any art form, the vast majority of movies are, by definition, average and many of them are very bad. To ignore these is a luxury I can ill afford.

If I have learnt anything from thinking about this as I write, it is that I want to resist the impulse to imply that I'm sorting films into two great piles marked "ones to watch" and "ones to avoid". There is undeniably a place for that critic, but it wouldn't make sense for that to me be, as I'm not a reliable populist. I didn't enjoy any of the three biggest current releases ('Pirates 4', 'Hangover 2' or 'X-Men: First Class'), though they are doubtless to prove highly popular with audiences and I would never dream of telling you to avoid seeing them.



I'd certainly be vain and out of touch to suggest a family of four forgo the thrills and spills of 'Pirates' and opt instead for 'The Great White Silence', just because I found it to be of greater interest. Someone who watches up to thirty films a month (usually for free) has next to no business telling anyone who sees one or two (for upwards of £7 a go) how and where to spend their money. A critic who sees thirty films a month may well develop different tastes to those with less cinema literacy and may lose sight of the fact that most people see film less as art and more as something to pass the time. My say on what you go to see is of no discernible value. It is only hopefully of some interest.

I haven't even mentioned people like Charles Gant or Nikki Finke, who talk about movies as part of an industry, let alone journalists who come to cinema from the perspective of satisfying the public hunger for celebrity gossip or fashion advice. There is also the film historian, like David Thompson or Ian Christie, to consider - but this'll have to do for now.

What are critics for? Damned if I know. But I'm certain there is a place for all the types I've described above and I know that, for whatever reason, I like to read what the best of them has to say.