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Making a mountain out of an ant hill

If you want a good look at the current, depressing state of film “journalism” you can’t do better than the recent round of coverage of the Ant-Man movie Marvel Studios has in the works.

To recap the facts: Writer/Director Edgar Wright has been working on the movie for something like six or seven years. The movie finally got a release date for 2015 and buzz had been building because geeks already love Wright and the couple snippets of test/concept footage he’s released have been pretty cool. Then last week he pulled out suddenly, citing the usual “creative differences.” There was some mention of last-minute script revisions done without his guidance, but no one – at least not that I’ve seen – has gone on record confirming that.

ant-man-comics

Since news broke, though, the various movie and entertainment sites and blogs have gone absolutely bonkers with speculation, rumor, conjecture and hearsay, all written either in a way that over-sensationalizes something that comes nowhere near being a fact or which states as fact the latest rumor or bit of gossip. And because everyone is unwilling to cede pageviews to any other site these rumors (and worse) show up on every site since heaven forbid they not appear on the first page of search results for “ant man director.”

I can’t help thinking “this is what we’ve wrought” whenever 35% of my RSS reading is some variation on the latest non-story. But mostly it just makes me sad, both that there’s so little reporting going on and such a mad rush for pagviews that the slightest whisper, regardless or its source, triggers a mad dash to the “Publish” button.

Fighting the tendency to go down the “things were different in my day” road, things have changed a lot in the last several years when it comes to the movie blog/site world. The big sites have gotten bigger, some smaller sites have faded out, new players have emerged, some former leaders in the space have gone corporate and so on. But one thing that hasn’t changed – at least from my perspective – is the relationship between these sites and the studios they report on.

As these sites began to grow studio publicists began to notice them and included them on their press outreach. So they would get pitched news and so on and even got invited to location visits. But, because these sites and their writers were basically just taking what was spoon-fed to them and/or aggregating stories from the Hollywood trades there was little in the way of “reporting” that developed.

These sites were started and run by fans and not reporters, which at first is what was great about them. “Wow, here are fans just talking about what’s important to *them* and not being all stodgy and old-fashioned about it.” That’s exactly what the early days of the social web was supposed to enable and it did. But then things began to grow and we entered into a state of what can only be called Mutually Assured Destruction.

See it’s not like any one site at this point can say “You know what, we’re done with (fill in the name of any property, especially one that caters to geek culture) rumors, we’re going to do some hard reporting.” To do so would be to cede pageviews – and therefore ad revenue – to the four dozen competing sites who are going to be all too happy to continue running every piece of rampant speculation they can.

So everyone goes on about their merry way, adding question marks to headlines (something that should result in immediate confiscation of your keyboard) and acting like they’re just doing what their readers want them to do.

It’s enough to make you long for the good old days of restricted access to publishing platforms, strict editorial oversight and other vestiges of the “old media” world. But now instead of worrying about whether they got the story right – or even if there are *any* facts in what’s being written – all concerns are about filling the content maw. If X number of posts aren’t published these sites can’t fill their ad quota, won’t publish enough tweets to get traction and so on. Every story, rumor and report must be commented on, regardless of whether either the source or the comment has any credibility.

The bigger, more serious problem is that what started out as a fringe problem has now infected the whole organism. Traditional Hollywood trades that *had* the reporting resources have followed everyone to the bottom at the same time they’ve had systemic problems faced by others in the media industry, problems that have resulted in layoffs of the staff that could chase down leads and verify rumors before they went to print. Now everyone is on the gossip train for better or worse.

I hold out hope that things will course correct in the near future and we won’t be stuck in a world where truth is unknowable because no one has the skills to divine it from the other, more salacious voices whispering in their ear. But I fear that won’t be coming any time soon, which is too bad since this version of things is, to be honest and personal, beginning to impact my enjoyment of the movies themselves. Moreso, in fact, than any of the countless spoilers that are posted about these sites in the lead up to release, right up until the point where the same sites that have run 54 unfounded rumors complain that they don’t want to be spoiled about the movie itself.

Yes, this is a rant. But it’s one that I hope points to some serious problems. I don’t know what the solution is outside of pleading with everyone to do a better job when doing their job. But I’m hoping that there are people who will fight to do things more above-board and in a more responsible – one might even say journalistic – manner.