WotC WotC blacklist. Discussion

[bedir than]

How often do they work with anyone that's not on their payroll?

The hold advanced pressers for other media outlets regularly. None which are included in the surveys, so they aren't considered thought leaders like EN World. But, they still get early access and exclusive interviews.

 

[payn]

It’s absolutely true that the culture has changed significantly in those 20 years, the weird thing is singling out participation trophies as the cause of that change. There’s a contingent of people who get bafflingly worked up over participation trophies and seem to think they’re everything that’s wrong with society, and… nobody else really cares about them at all.

Heck, at this point, the anti-participation trophy sentiment itself feels pretty outdated. Like, come on, haven’t you moved on to griping about CRT yet?

Like Pepperidge Farms, I remember when video games wrecked kids after television wrecked kids after the printing press wrecked kids.

 

[Morrus]

The hold advanced pressers for other media outlets regularly. None which are included in the surveys, so they aren't considered thought leaders like EN World. But, they still get early access and exclusive interviews.

We're actually better positioned not part of that PR schedule. We're not bound by embargoes and can post news when we learn it (which is almost always before that date). The actual information in those articles is generally compiled here within minutes, so the advance access doesn't actually have a real value. It gives us a real flexibility. Most of the larger outlets aren't really interested in the level of detail we're used to anyway--the articles are more for a broad audience than the more hard core fans who read TTRPG news sites.

Also I imagine they don't need to show us stuff in special presentations, because they know we'll seek it out ourselves and share it anyway. We're kinda ready-made fans; they don't need to PR at us. We'll happily PR at ourselves on their behalf!

The downside is that sometimes people ask "why aren't you covering X like this other site is?" and I'm like "we did, 3 months ago, when it was news!"

(I did ask them once on Twitter if it bothered them that we tended to scoop their announcements beforehand, as I wasn't out to annoy anybody, but they never replied, so I figured they don't really care what we get up to here in our little corner of the community)

 

[Parmandur]

The hold advanced pressers for other media outlets regularly. None which are included in the surveys, so they aren't considered thought leaders like EN World. But, they still get early access and exclusive interviews.

Yeah, Polygon and Comic Book Resources were nor name checked in the survey, but they get invites to advance press events by WotC all the time.

 

[bedir than]

We're actually better positioned not part of that PR schedule. We're not bound by embargoes and can post news when we learn it (which is almost always before that date). The actual information in those articles is generally compiled here within minutes, so the advance access doesn't actually have a real value. It gives us a real flexibility. Most of the larger outlets aren't really interested in the level of detail we're used to anyway--the articles are more for a broad audience than the more hard core fans who read TTRPG news sites.

The downside is that sometimes people ask "why aren't you covering X like this other site is?" and I'm like "we did, 3 months ago, when it was news!"

In my soccer journalism I tend to hate when I learn stuff from the club that's embargoed. It prevents me from covering individually, instead I'm in the same flood of news within 15 minutes of the veil lifting.

The exclusive interviews are helpful though.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

Yeah, Polygon and Comic Book Resources were nor name checked in the survey, but they get invites to advance press events by WotC all the time.

Liked CBR better when it was a dedicated comics site, instead of yet another listicle factory. Only reason I still visit there is the extant community, still chugging along on forum software two generations out of date.

 

[The Glen]

As long as we still have Ted From Nerd immersion it's all good

 

[darjr]

Well, if I know anything, if the list is a personal vendetta, then promoting ENWorld and ENPublishing, especially when they show up in WoTC output, will infuriate the lister.

 

[Oofta]

We definitely got participation medals for youth soccer back when I played in the mid 80s. I can say this with certainty because my mom just handed me a box of things she had saved from when I was a kid and they were in there.

Now that I'm old and have my own kid who is almost grown up, I've come to believe that participation "trophies" are mostly for the parents rather than the kids. The kids don't care - they know who wins and who loses and what a "thanks for participating" ribbon really means. In fact the kids are some of the ones who might be the most openly hostile about the whole thing - at the end of a tournament nobody is deluded into thinking that their "participation medal" is the equivalent of the medals the winning teams get. It's the parents who want to have some kind of artifact to hang onto and put into a scrapbook or display case or even just a shoebox to have as a memento of when their kid did something. A reminder of when their kid was 8 and played teeball or 6 and played soccer and how proud you were to see them out there just running their heart out giving it their all even if their team didn't win.

I don't think my kid has looked at any of the "thanks for participating" tchotchkes they got for playing youth sports when they were in elementary school. In fact I remember them being one of the kids who was openly hostile about the whole idea after one particular losing event. Conversely, my wife has every single one of them saved in her memento box, and as the kid is now a surly teenager instead of a surly elementary school student I can kind of see the appeal of saving those memories like that.

My nephews called them "good breathing" awards. Yes, they're for the parents, not the kids. Actually they're for the people running the events so they don't have to listen to people complain about how Timmy didn't get an award for just showing up.

 

[Faolyn]

Isn't this Graeme Barber, rather than Orion Black?

I seem to recall that Orion Black got mad because they, as a relative newbie, weren't immediately treated the same way that all of the much more accomplished writers were. Or at least that's the impression I got after reading their complaints.