... do so many journalists write about fan-, and especially slash-fiction as if it is some weird previously unheard-of phenomenon that they're just bringing to light?
Okay, sometimes some fiction is a little weird, but really... people, get a grip. After this long, how is it still possible for journalists to get away with writing with such google-eyed panic about the topic?
6 comments:
For as long as people keep paying them to? I imagine the Guardian's book section is pretty insulated though: it probably is new to them.
Why are journalists so late on picking up any yoof subculture or just subculture thing.
They're not only late they are invariably wrong on all the key details.
Next big thing is bobby soxers screaming at crooning singers.
Don't gorget where you heard it first, folks.
Can you change "gorget" to "forget".
Today is a clumpy finger day.
It's so hard typing wearing a bear costume.
When I say you don't help me... Hmmm... I've not worked out how to change comments though...
"Why are journalists so late on picking up any yoof subculture or just subculture thing."
Define 'journalists', my friend, before you carpet-bomb us all with your accusations. ;-)
Actually, there are a lot of reasons: journalists having to go to university and then be too old for youth stuff by the time they emerge; journalists getting paid such crappy wages they can't afford to do anything of an evening; newspapers and mags not really being interested in youth culture because youths don't buy newspapers and mags; mags and newspapers not staffed enough to allow reporters to spend days at a time investigating youth culture; reporters spending most of their day in front of computers; mags and newspapers not being funded enough to cope with long investigations.
I could go on. But fundamentally, would youth culture really want mainstream magazines latching on to them and investigating them? Look what's happened to MySpace: as soon as everyone started noticing how popular it was, all the really cool kids left for something cooler. It may just have peaked at the same time, but I think there's a general desire for sub-cultures to deliberately want to identify themselves as sub-cultures rather than part of the mainstream.
I accept your points.
When I was a rocker (at about 14 years of age, I'm so much younger than that now with a far, far, far better taste in music) someone brought the Daily Mirror (or was it the Sun) in to school with an expose of this dangerous cult of headbanging.
It got so many facts wrong we just spent our break rolling on the floor laughing (or in the terminology of umpteen internet years ago rotfluipm).
Yes, the whole point of subcultures is that they remain underground (never coming up to womble free).
Once a subculture has a name and a spread in Vanity Fair, or a piece by Dylan Jones, then it's officially over.
Several weeks ago Rullsenberg bought the Radio Times (for some strange reason known only to her ;)
and it had a letter asking for an explnation of "grime" and "swingstep" (it may be called something totally different - such is my memory for such things).
And that was the death knell for those two subcultures.
(Apparently "grime" is music like Dizzee Rascal and comes from Hackney and "swingstep" comes from Croydon. So it's an East - South London thing. But there again that is so last year last year).
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