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Topic: Rules for criticizing specific editors here?
| Author | Message |
| dribbledrive1 | Posted – 4/11/2008 2:49:00 AM | show profile I don't really get this thread, except as an ego think for oceanvue. Here's your answer: Post whatever the heck you want. If it gets taken off, you'll know the MB folk don't like it. |
| Louisewasnothalfbad | Posted – 4/11/2008 4:35:57 PM | show profile But most likely, the main reason for the removal of posts that name names and companies is the jobs board. Why would any company advertise on a site that allows said company to be maligned--even if the comments are accurate? And as advertising is the chief revenue stream --well, do the math. |
| sophiesMOM | Posted – 4/11/2008 4:57:34 PM | show profile qunester and oceanvue.....separated at birth? |
| noname1234 | Posted – 4/11/2008 5:09:05 PM | show profile Have posts been removed because someone criticised a company? I certainly don't read everything here so I can't say for sure; I don't remember hearing of that happening, though. |
| seeattleme | Posted – 4/11/2008 9:22:48 PM | show profile Oh my dear, poor dumb. noname: aspiring to be great is what makes you great. -senior staff will not make you great, theywill use your talent to make themselves great. Reasearch your history.Do your research. It;s the hotheads that make news. Sorry but true. So sad you don't get it. Doesn't the smell of crap on your nose from brownnosing get distasteful???? |
| seeattleme | Posted – 4/11/2008 9:25:06 PM | show profile I have no fucking idea who oceanvue is--being from Se-fucking ATTLe--but oceanvue--care to step in to quiet Mirage (who is disguising herself under another screen name??????) |
| noname1234 | Posted – 4/11/2008 9:59:58 PM | show profile quenster, i mean this politely-- Are you drunk or high when you post? Because your comments are just utterly laughable, idiotic and so off-base as to be bewildering. Sorry, I don't think being a hotheaded asshole is the way to forge a career in, frankly, ANY industry. The hotheaded assholes who are successful are successful in SPITE of their behavior, not because of it. They're exceptionally talented -- or exceptionally lucky -- and thus their awful behavior is overlooked. Behaving like a decent human being to the people you encounter isn't "brownnosing." Sure, Normal Mailer stabbed his wife -- does that mean that I'd advise young writers who aspire to his success to start sharpening their knives? Uh, no. |
| Mirage | Posted – 4/12/2008 1:41:17 AM | show profile Ah, I love when my name is invoked. Please, tell me more about what I'm doing. |
| Marie | Posted – 4/12/2008 11:54:10 AM | show profile I can't believe I'm getting involved in this, but it's a slow Saturday morning. I, too, believe there's too much fear in this business about all the burning bridges crap that contributes to the abysmal conditions in this industry, especially for freelancers. I can't believe what people are afraid to speak up about and all the agonizing about what to do in the most basic situations. That said, all the names cited as huge successes are also exceptional talents, and would succeed almost no matter how they acted. Most of us, as one poster acutely acknowledged, are not these people. We're ordinary. And if we were these exceptional people, we wouldn't be posting here. There has to be some medium between total sycophant and asshole. That's what most of us should strive for. If you're an asshole, you'd better have the talent. With the talent, I think you can get away with being a violence-inciting asshole. I forgot what the OP's question was, so hope I haven't waylaid this post too much. |
| ingride | Posted – 4/13/2008 11:02:17 AM | show profile Tell us what happened People who don't want to read the post don't have to. Just tell the facts. The ed/publication you name has the option of responding right on this thread, as one publishing company did just a week or so ago. If the ed/publication wants to take legal action (libel) remember that the burden is on them to disprove your facts. If people would speak up abt the eds and pubs we should avoid, and the facts abt why, that might improve the conduct of the people who are the subjects of the complaints. MB posters do plenty complaining, but they take no real action. In which case, stop complaining, pls. I used to freelance full time (no more). When I THINK of the errors that were written into my stories by eds who never returned the working copy to me, it still makes my blood run cold. Or pubs that send you their contracts after yr article is ready to go and the contract is a full nelson... Or who give you totally new instructions after you have submitted based on their first instructions. &c. It would be good to know ahead of time who they are, because they are so often repeaters. And ignore the "burning bridges" stuff. The country is full of publications and burning bridges is a dumb cliche -- the kind I would edit out of a mss. |
| caitlinkelly | Posted – 4/13/2008 3:45:15 PM | show profile MB has plenty of value but only on private boards like ASJA and FLX are you likely to get a straight answer when you need to know, by name of editor and/or their publication, whom to avoid and for what reasons. That's because you must use your real name when you post on-line, and people in those groups either know the quality of your work and/or your character (i.e. hothead) -- so whatever dire warnings someone offers can be taken seriously, with a grain of salt or dismissed. If five or ten colleagues whose work I know and respect, whose characters I know and respect, say XYZ is a real jerk to work for, I'll listen more carefully than to anonymous posters here who are....? Who, exactly? Naming names here of egregious editors or pub's isn't useful, really. When an editor is hopeless (as editors feel about some of us), walk away. Bitch over a beer to someone you trust you'd like to warn away from disaster. When they do it for you in return, you've got something more valuable than publicly burning a bridge, no matter how satisfying it feels. |
| WordyBird | Posted – 4/13/2008 5:25:29 PM | show profile You're far better off talking brutal specifics on a private listserv, as Caitlin said. Another way to go about it would be to ask if anyone has had experience working with Company X and to enable your e-mail to discuss it privately. You may get 15 e-mails, depending on who it is, but you can always respond en masse using the bcc feature of your e-mail program to state your case and ask folks if they've also been through it. That said, complaining about an editor doing heavy edits on your work, having a curmudgeonly personality, or not responding to you with the alacrity or style you'd prefer is going to come off as unprofessional. After all, for all we know, your writing stinks, you yourself are abrasive, and the editor you're bashing could be doing the work of three people while coping with health issues and a divorce. It's best to stick to companies, and it's best to stick to business practices--such as late payment, dubious journalistic ethics (letting advertisers write by-lined articles and passing them off as straight news), and things of that ilk. Anything else is just a clash of personality and style, and the only one who will come out looking bad is the complainer. Just my opinion. |
| oceanvue | Posted – 4/15/2008 12:18:40 PM | show profile >>oceanvue--care to step in to quiet Mirage (who is disguising herself under another screen name??????)<< Hi again qunester, Actually I was going to leave this thread alone. Now that so many inane comments about "hothead" and "asshole" and so forth have been irrelevantly tossed into the discourse which has no application to what I wanted to describe -- unless you want to call the editor I have in mind that "A" word, and really the "C" word is more appropriate for her -- I decided to add my own thoughts on the strange turn this thread took. However, in the meanwhile, you're right -- you're in one corner of the country and I'm in the exact opposite, while SophisMOM and Mirage seem to be only in different corners of the same mind. |
| Mirage | Posted – 4/15/2008 5:38:56 PM | show profile | email poster I don't really have the time to dispute this, but hey...I just won't respond to any unsolicited pitches today. I don't know anything about oceanvue except that (s)he seems argumentative, and appears to have started this thread just to troll. Whatever. As for qunester, she is clearly unbalanced (and leaves her "fingerprints" all over the Web, so it's relatively easy to see who she is and precisely what her mental disorder is). After this post, I will not respond to you, qunester/granitegirl/doglady-- so keep baiting me, dear, if it's all that important to you. Just don't expect a response. I don't know who Sophie's Mom is, and being a single (and childless) woman myself, that would be an odd alter-ego for me to choose. Unlike some of us here, I've had this screen name on Mediabistro for years...and some posters here know who I am. I have no need to "disguise" myself or change my name, and I've enabled my e-mail if knowing exactly who I am means so much to anyone else. |
| Decorama | Posted – 4/15/2008 6:23:20 PM | show profile Darling, it's not the ocean, it's a shallow creek Gosh, this thread is much ado about nothing! For those of us expecting a Devil Wears Prada-esque expose, what a crashing bore our oceanvue has been! Nothing sublime or picturesque here! Well, I guess she was just mulling over her options and decided not to go forward with her particular agenda. Quel drag. |
| seeattleme | Posted – 4/15/2008 6:30:27 PM | show profile Mirage, trace the posts. You started off baiting me. I've never specifically mentioned oyu in a post until you've mentioned me (and accused me of changing my screen name in order to agree with someone else). Finally, confronting bad behavior and calling attention to those who take advantage of others is not being an asshole. Engaging in this kind of behavior--or ignoring it--is. No I am not drunk or high when I post. At least, not every time I post. When I am drunk or high I am generally nowhere near a computer because I have friends I like to get drunk and stoned with. Friends OFFLINE. Imagine that. |
| oceanvue | Posted – 4/15/2008 8:10:29 PM | show profile >>I don't know who Sophie's Mom is, and being a single (and childless) woman myself, that would be an odd alter-ego for me to choose. << And likewise, your stuipd remark about me being qunester is even further off the mark since I'm a guy at one end of the country and she's a woman at the other. No alter-ego there although I agree with a great deal of what she has to say about the editorial world - a subject you avoid entirely in your rush to make ad hominem attacks. Since you clearly have nothing constructive, useful or even sane to say why don't you do the world a favor and STFU? |
| oceanvue | Posted – 4/15/2008 8:19:06 PM | show profile >>For those of us expecting a Devil Wears Prada-esque expose, what a crashing bore our oceanvue has been! Nothing sublime or picturesque here!<< Dear Deco, in point of fact weighing options does a world of good...and doesn't necessarily mean not going forward. The time used allowed me to conclude the best course is to actually follow some of the advice about not naming names--although for entirely different reasons than the suck-up/brown-nose crowd espouses. No, I intend to not name actual names but instead make it perfectly transparent after a few posts to the Devil's friends and even her -- if she's reading -- who I'm referring to. It's known as deniability, you see;) And no, the person in question is no Devil -- they're way too mediocre to be rated that high, also way too superficial and trashy to be rated up there with any Meryl Streep type character. Sorry to dissapoint about that, but you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, can you? Nevertheless, a slow verbal strip-tease of innuendo and minor detail will be worth the mortification and anger it causes the subject and its friends. |
| WordyBird | Posted – 4/16/2008 1:05:37 AM | show profile I wonder if perhaps the energy wouldn't be better spent in improving your situation and career? Just a thought. It seems to me that spending a lot of time and energy on smearing someone, even without naming names, is time and energy you could be out there getting a better job, pitching articles, etc. |
| seeattleme | Posted – 4/16/2008 11:23:38 AM | show profile And of course, I again point out the obvious: If I am high or stoned or crazy, I puzzle to understand why other posters would be concerned. Ignore the posts if you find them unreadable. Real Simple. The fact that you keep reading them (and follow my screen name history) is evidence of two things: I am posting some awfully interesting matter, and second, if I am not, this is more about you than it is about me. I couldn't tell you anyone's screen name history, or what anyone's last post was (Unless it was funny, like RTQ, below). Finally, having the same screen name and proclaiming that to be some kind of claim to legitimacy is BS. Use your real name. If you post here anon, it doesn't matter what your screen name happens to be or how often you change it. And enabling your screen name doesn't reveal your identity. It reveals the identity of the poster emailing you. You decide whether to respond or not, and you can do so using any email address you want. Back to the subject, this post talks about specific editors, but I'm all for one that outs writers who are unprofessional or unethical--hacks and prima donnas as well. Just so as these people have the opportunity to respond and defend themselves--which they do on the web, it's an open forum --I'd rather have acess to info and decide for myself. You're going to hear the gossip about people anyway. Thinking this does not go on in any work environment is naive.There are people out there who will talk shit about you for no other reason than jealousy or personal dislike. You can't control that. If it's at a cocktail party I'm not invited to, I can't do anything about that. If it's on a web site, at least I have the opportunity to respond. |
| sophiesMOM | Posted – 4/16/2008 11:48:41 AM | show profile sophie's mom here.....mirage and i are indeed two different people. when i jokingly suggested qunester and oceanvue "separated at birth" i didn't mean to say that they are the same person. what i meant was that their attitudes were very much alike. defensive, angry, etc. that is all. over and out. |
| noname1234 | Posted – 4/16/2008 1:07:04 PM | show profile Seeattleme/whatever -- and this is the last time I acknowledge you on this tread: You got a response from me because you again out-of-the-blue insulted me -- "poor, dumb noname." I took your juvenile bait, which I shouldn't do. But please don't confuse your childish tantrums with provocative insight. And it's a bit odd that some who insist over and over that she pays no mind to other people's screennames also out of the blue brought up the screenname of another member who hadn't even posted on this thread! As to your enthusiastic support of using anonymous internet posts to smear people you've worked with who you don't like, once I would have thought that was a rilly kewl idea. Then i hit puberty. |
| oceanvue | Posted – 4/16/2008 8:15:30 PM | show profile >>...you again out-of-the-blue insulted me...<< If you initially insist on insulting others then why feign surprise if they respond in like tone? On the one hand, if someone is "new" on this forum then everything they say is to be disbelieved according to you because they have no "credibility". On the other hand, if they have been posting a while and you don't like their message, then they also personally lack "credibility". In fact, no one has substantively refuted a word that qunester has to say about editor-writer interractions and the sometimes unfortunate outcome of working with impossible editors as an outside contributor. In fact, qunester has a great deal to say that's both valid, accurate and pertinent to much of what I experienced in my own particular situation. |
| seeattleme | Posted – 4/18/2008 1:14:45 AM | show profile Letter posted in the Observer... in an article titled "Freelance Fizzle": Catherine (not verified) says: Here's a topic for magazine editors to ponder: editor rudeness. I am a semi-established freelancer with one book under my belt in the same genre for which I often write articles. I also have a blog but am making no money from it because I enjoy publishing my work for the joy of getting it out there without hassle and editorial predilections. I have done this without an agent and periodic fits of tenacity. But it is wearing, especially when you discover that an editor for whom you've written many articles for in the past has published an article you pitched to them a year ago, that she never followed up about even though interested, and assigned to someone else. Or the promise of follow up to come from a new editorial relationship that just never comes, despite your ideas, your polite contact, their seeming enthusiasm. Or the lack of feedback about pitches, etc. in general. More than a few editors I've worked for in the past have often been indecisive, completely disorganized or end up rewriting the article to the point where there is no recognition of my own work. It doesn't take long to e-mail "yes", "no" or "maybe" or to be at least semi-responsive. And I'm talking about established relationships between writers and editors, not an answer from the slush pile. It can be difficult enough to sustain and maintain these relationships where often the only contact is via e-mail or the occasional phone call. If the magazines want good freelance writers and get them, they should learn how to keep them. Considering them "call girls" for hire or assignment and not returning their calls is not a good relationship or business methodology for anyone. Fortunately, I do not derive my sole income from freelance writing. Some would call this predicament not being "hungry" enough for it but I think J.D. Salinger had the right idea after all. If magazines fail it is not because of the freelancers or the writing staff or the reading public or the internet. It is because magazine editors can be largely an unorganized, ungrateful rude bunch of folks and should court their writers--and photographers--as avidly as they probably do their publishers and advertisers. |
| editingfool | Posted – 4/18/2008 9:06:19 AM | show profile **magazine editors can be largely an unorganized, ungrateful rude bunch of folks and should court their writers--and photographers--as avidly as they probably do their publishers and advertisers.** why do writers blame middle management (editors) for what upper management (publishers, president) has done? the value of both writing and editing has been reduced to nothing. that's not for lack of editors or writers trying. once and for all get it through your thick heads that it's not the editing profession that's killing the freelancer. |
