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EDITORIAL: Internet Sites Behaving BadlyBy Josh Tyler: 2006-12-15 00:00:00
Universal is sick and tired of the internet, and they’re not going to take it anymore. The guys over at Cinematical have picked up a notice from Universal Pictures in which they’re threatening to lock out internet movie sites from covering their films, because they’re sick and tired of their bad behavior.
What kind of behavior are we talking about here? Apparently stars being set up for legit interviews with the press are instead being mobbed for autographs and pictures by unprofessional fanboys with their own blog. They’re bombarded with cell phone cameras and just plain unprofessional behavior. Stars are even being stalked after they leave the press room. No surprise, since this isn’t even a profession for some of these people. It’s a good time. And there’s the problem. Rather than locking out the internet and shooting themselves in the foot by killing the most powerful promotional tool they have available, maybe Universal should simply consider being more careful about how they decide which internet writers they let in. Now I’m not telling you it’s easy to get press access to events like this. It isn’t. In fact it’s damned hard. But it’s hard because access is often doled out based on who you know or who you can butter up, rather than how legitimate your site is or how professional your work is. On a weekend whim a guy puts up a blog that only his mom visits, and then talks his way into getting exclusive press access because he knows one of the studio’s press agents or he’s ingratiated himself with a semi-legitimate critical organization. Or worse and far more common, he's agrees to say positive things about a movie in exchange for getting access. People like that haven’t had to earn the right to be there, and so they don’t respect it. The system that’s letting these people in is set up to favor who you know and how many palms you can grease, not what you do. The big problem here is that a few yahoos give the rest of us a bad reputation. Hollywood tends to lump “the internet” together in one big pot. If one or two idiots from a Geocities site irritate Angelina Jolie, then for some reason all of us get blamed. It really doesn’t make sense. If a kid from a college newspaper spills coffee on Matt Damon, do they blame Entertainment Weekly? Of course not. Rather than simply blanket blaming the “bad internet” again as studios seem to do for everything, why not take a look at the problem on a case by case basis? And fanboy bloggers… cut it out. Enough is enough. There’s no excuse for this. When you get in to something like this, try to act like you’ve been there before. The rest of us would like to be invited back.
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