Episode 220: The Fan-Journalist
On Episode 220, “The Fan-Journalist,” Flourish and Elizabeth welcome one particular fan-journalist—Kayti Burt—to discuss her recent article for us on the specific challenges of covering things you love in a very precarious industry. Topics discussed include Kayti’s journey from youthful fandom to pop culture reporting, a step-by-step rundown of how an article goes from idea to finished product, and the many ethical questions journalists have to weigh when writing about fans or their objects of fandom.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:00:47] Kayti’s piece for us is “The Fan-Journalist Tightrope”—definitely check it out before you listen to the interview! (And note that if you prefer listening to reading, Kayti has recorded herself reading the full piece aloud.)
[00:01:40] You can check out all of Kayti’s work on her website; she’s also on Instagram and Twitter.
[00:03:16] Our interstitial music throughout is “Tech toys” by Lee Rosevere, also used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:04:51]
[00:18:58] Definitely check out Defector, the granddaddy of the current wave of worker-owned publications, especially if you’re into sports. Other examples include Hell Gate (New York City), Sequencer (science) Aftermath (gaming), and Rascal (TTRPGs). And Elizabeth strongly recs 404 Media (tech), which does incredible work. (She’s a subscriber!)
[00:23:33] Yes, the word choice was deliberate, because James Cameron did, in fact, say (in Playboy lol): “Right from the beginning I said, ‘She’s got to have tits,’ even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na’vi, aren’t placental mammals.”
[00:33:59] In fact, Richard Brody’s review of Ant-Man 3 begins with a deeply fair assessment of the genre, and the current state of the MCU in particular:
Just as the trouble with Bible-thumping is the thumping, not the Bible, the problem with superhero-franchise movies isn’t the source material but the uses to which it’s put. If some viewers and even some critics have given vent to feelings of superhero fatigue, it’s not only because of the sheer number of such movies. If they were more consistently good, they’d be more consistently welcomed. What’s fatiguing, in particular, is the formula—one of overproduced, corporate-dictated, eye-on-the-marketplace, focus-grouped, committee-created cinema. When the Marvel world was still being developed, many of the movies had the appealing overflow of loose ends, a delight in discovery unconstrained by formatting, because the program was yet to be figured out. Now the machine is humming, and it has been a while—specifically, since “Black Panther,” in 2018—since a Marvel movie has felt as if it wasn’t completely a package within a package, an unmitigated prefabrication.
[00:48:32] Flourish has actually been in a fight with the dictionary for seven years now.
[01:05:20] FYI, Kayti is a member of the Freelance Solidarity Project—if you’re a journalist and interested in the workers’ rights elements of our conversation, definitely check them out!
[01:07:04] That’s Episode 205: “Fanfluencers.”
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #220, “The Fan-Journalist.”
FK: And we are interviewing Kayti Burt.
ELM: Yes, so Kayti, longtime friend of Fansplaining. She has written a piece. Actually, we started talking about this piece—you weren’t there, Flourish. Sorry to tell you. But Kayti was on the panel that Devon Maloney and I ran at Comic-Con last year, which was about people who are fans and journalists, and whether you cover fandom or you use fandom in your journalism, right? Or you write about quote-unquote “fannish” properties, right?
And Kayti was on the panel, and had some really great thoughts, and so way back then, I was like, “You should write about this for us.” And she did, and then I sat on the draft for many months, [FK laughs] and now we’ve polished it up, and it’s published. So definitely go check the show notes before you listen to this conversation, because I think it’s a really great piece. It’s really well written, and, I think, really good grounding for this conversation.
FK: Yeah. Well, I’m excited because Kayti—I mean, obviously I know about the kind of journalism that relates to fandom that you do, and that Aja Romano does and so forth. But Kayti does other kinds of journalism that are also relevant to fans. Kayti writes about, you know, things that fans care about, right? And so that’s also important journalism that relates to fans and to her being a fan and a journalist, and I’m really—I don’t know. I’m just, I’m interested in hearing about this. This is not a category of thing that I particularly know how the sausage gets made, despite listening to you. I’m just excited to hear it.
ELM: I think I would describe it as, like, how we always describe this podcast when people ask us about it. They’re like, “Oh, so you talk about Game of Thrones?” And it’s like, [laughs] “Well…” They don’t say that now, but they did, like, four years ago, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And we’re like, “No, we might talk about behaviors happening within the Game of Thrones fandom, but we don’t talk about the thing.” Right? Whereas, like, this is the equivalent of talking about Game of Thrones, right? You know?
FK: Right, Kayti talking about the thing.
ELM: Yes. Yeah, so there’s different ways in. And she’s written about fandoms themselves, too.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah yeah yeah, obviously.
ELM: And there’s obviously a lot of intersect in the middle that she also covers.
FK: Right.
ELM: But yeah, it’s definitely—there’s a different set of problems than the ones that I face, trying to convince editors that a story about fans is interesting. I think that it’s also challenging trying to convince editors that a story about something that fans find valuable [laughs] is interesting—you know? It’s all connected, right?
FK: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean I think that probably, by volume, fans of things probably consume more stuff about their favorite thing than they do about the fans of their favorite thing, so it’s really impactful on, yeah, on anybody who loves an entertainment property or a band or what have you, right?
ELM: But then there’s the dark side, if you don’t say something that they like, and then the critics versus the fans and all this stuff…
FK: [overlapping] All right all right all right. Let’s actually call Kayti. How’s that sound?
ELM: OK, let’s do it.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, it’s time to welcome Kayti to the podcast. Hey, Kayti!
Kayti Burt: Hello! I’m so happy to be here. I’ve been a longtime listener.
ELM: Well, we’re very excited to have you. So we’re both journalists here. I’m gonna defer to you.
KB: Ooh.
FK: [laughing] The two of you are journalists, here. We’re not all journalists here, [KB laughs] but two of the three.
ELM: I’m sorry, we’re both—just, let’s talk journalist to journalist. Let’s only— [FK laughs] OK, but before we get into that, I think we should introduce you a little bit. So can you kind of give us your, like, fandom origin story? Your fandom background and how that led—I mean, that’s kind of related to fandom journalism, how that led you into this career?
KB: I don’t really remember not being a fan of things. [laughs]
ELM: From the womb?
KB: From the womb, I was a fan. No, as a kid, I grew up in rural New Hampshire, and it was very culturally homogenous, so stories were kind of my way of getting to learn more about the world. [laughs] But even then it was, like, also I wanted to kind of understand what other people thought about, about those stories. Like, I have three siblings, and we didn’t have cable when I was a kid, but we did have, you know, the video store, and we got really into this Australian period drama called Five Mile Creek, which stars a young Nicole Kidman.
ELM: Hmm.
KB: But I remember really distinctly being like, “We’re gonna play a game. We’re all gonna be characters from this TV show. So let’s go around, we can all pick one character at a time to play.” And we never actually played anything. I just wanted to know which characters they were going to pick. [all laugh] But I also, you know, I grew up watching The X Files and reading Harry Potter, and apparently reading Harry Potter fanfiction, I learned from my journal as a 10 year old, or something, which I don’t really remember—
FK: Ah!
KB: —but is written in ink, so it has to be true. There was, like, a burgeoning internet, you know, dial-up that had to be shared amongst six family members, so it wasn’t a huge…I wasn’t able to access it at all times. [KB & ELM laugh] But I just loved stories and loved talking to other people. I was a huge fan of Alias in high school and would read Television Without Pity recaps.
FK: Yeah!
KB: And then I would write, like, elaborate recaps of every episode for my friend who was, like, kind of interested. Like, she didn’t really watch it, [ELM laughs] but I was like, “Oh you missed this week’s episode? Let me write an elaborate Television Without Pity-style recap for you about what happened.” [FK laughs] So yeah, it’s always been a big part of my life, and then I went to school for Film Studies and English and graduated in 2009, which was a terrible year to graduate. There weren’t a lot of—
ELM: Best year. [KB laughs] Finest year for jobs.
KB: There weren’t a lot of jobs. [KB & ELM laugh] In retrospect, maybe there were more jobs than there are now in journalism, but…I don’t know.
FK: Ahhhhh…
ELM: Yeah, journalism probably.
KB: Yeah.
ELM: But…
KB: But generally, no. And I started working for a weekly newspaper, so that was the job I could find in my rural New Hampshire community that was the closest to something I wanted to do, and eventually was just like, “I can’t do this anymore. I want to be writing about media.” So I quit that job and started freelancing, and that was I think about 11 or 12 years ago, and I’ve been doing that ever since.
ELM: And your kind of way into writing about media—so here’s what I’ll say off the bat, because I think it’s important to establish this as we talk about fandom journalism, but I have always thought that you and I come at it from somewhat different angles, because I am not an entertainment journalist, for the most part. Obviously, there have been times when I’ve used an interest to do a more—you know, I wrote about Sherlock or whatever, right?
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: And you could peg that to Sherlock being on, in an entertainment journalist way, but for the most part, I’m just writing about fans and fandoms.
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: Whereas I feel like you’re coming at it—you’ve done a lot of entertainment journalism. You’ve written about the actual properties, right?
KB: Yeah, like I’ve gone on set visits, I’ve interviewed a lot of, you know, the cast and behind-the-scenes people at comic-cons, written a lot of recaps. I do think part of it, you know, I’m interested in a lot of different things and coming at stories from a lot of different angles, and I do think that being able to write about media and especially get to talk to the people who make it has been helpful in me understanding fandom and my own fandom. I do think part of it is, like, somewhat out of necessity. Like, what are the jobs that are available? And I think as a journalist in general, especially with—or maybe not especially, but at least as an entertainment journalist or cultural critic or entertainment reporter, whatever you want to call it, it’s like you often have to have all these different hats, because you have to do everything. Both as a staff writer, which I was for a while, and then especially maybe as a freelancer, where you’re taking the jobs or you’re finding the trends that are, [laughs] like, the editors or whoever have decided are important or valuable in that moment.
FK: So this may be a little bit naive or silly of me to, you know, even say, but I do think that most people understand that there’s certain kinds of entertainment journalism, and then they understand that then there’s, like, news reporting, which is different, where you’re, you know, on a beat.
KB: Mmm hmm.
FK: Like, I guess you’re gonna go down to the police station or something? Crime reporting, things like that.
KB: Right.
FK: Right? [ELM laughs]
KB: And you’re maybe trying to hold people in power—
FK: Right.
KB: —accountable. Yeah.
FK: Like, investigative, or whatever. I think that maybe there’s, like, I don’t think I would’ve known the difference—I mean, I would know the difference in prestige between different outlets.
KB: Mmm hmm.
FK: But I wouldn’t necessarily have known the difference in the approach to reporting that people are taking from an entertainment reporter at a very high-prestige outlet to someone who’s doing the kind of work that Elizabeth is doing.
KB: Mmm hmm.
FK: Is it just that it’s, like, pegged to, “We’re going to cover all of the movies and films here,” versus what Elizabeth is talking about as more sort of a general issue? I’m just trying to think about the way that you actually find things to write about and how you choose what you’re writing about.
ELM: I want you to answer that, but I’m gonna object to the way that you framed the journalism that I do. Because I am a reporter.
FK: I know you’re a reporter! I just don’t know how to talk about it!
ELM: [laughs] Right, but I write about fans, right? You know?
FK: Right.
ELM: I don’t write about the properties.
FK: Right.
KB: Yeah, I don’t know if this totally answers your question, but I think a part of what I think of as entertainment journalism, and one of the reasons I left my staff job, was because it feels very access-driven.
FK: Right.
ELM: Mmm hmm.
KB: Like, publicists from media companies who are trying to…have a certain budget to promote their TV shows, their movies, whatever, and are setting up press junkets or are reaching out to entertainment journalists to cover an upcoming release and that is, I think, a lot of—especially maybe, like, mid-tier outlets—that is kind of how they survive, because I think increasingly it’s, like, what are entertainment journalists able to do or supported to do that is so different from, you know, social media or [laughs] other spaces?
FK: Right.
KB: I think, you know, a difference with, like, fandom journalism—and I haven’t, you know, I occasionally have written something that’s more about fan culture, and I’m interested in it as a human [laughs] and as a professional—is that there isn’t that sort of corporate interest in promoting and, like, making it accessible, I guess. I think you have to work a little harder to pitch it—or at least, this is from my perspective—pitch it and also, yeah, it’s a different—it just feels like a very different kind of journalism.
FK: So to try to make sure I understand what you’re saying, with a lot of entertainment journalism, whether you’re a staff writer, who’s receiving this as part of your job, or whether you’re an independent writer who’s, you know, just has bylines and people know about you, you’re getting reached out to by the properties or, you know, you’re having that kind of access offered to you, and that’s one of the ways that you decide what you’re going to write about, because obviously if you don’t have the access, it’s much harder to write a piece.
KB: Mmm hmm.
FK: And that’s one of the things that you have that people on social media don’t. Whereas the kind of work Elizabeth’s talking about, Elizabeth is going to find a story and pitch it to somebody, and it’s not like someone’s offering—it’s not like there’s some fan who’s offering you access. What would that even be like?
KB: Yeah, and it’s like, although I think fans have a lot of power in terms of when they organize and want to do things with that collective power, I don’t think, you know, compared to the, like, millions or billions of dollars [laugh] that corporations have to promote their stuff, it’s not really the same thing. So there isn’t that sort of infrastructure. I do think a lot of entertainment journalism has kind of evolved into that, where it’s like an extension of the PR department.
FK: Mmm.
KB: And I’ve had moments where I’ve been able to get access through a publicist, and then I’ve written a story that is not necessarily incredibly flattering towards the TV show or whatever, and that publicist has been kind of upset about it, and it’s like, [laughs] “Well my job is not actually the same thing as your job, and if I’m just writing what you want me to write, or what is only a promotion of the show, then I’m not doing my job.”
And especially as outlets disappear and there’s kind of an identity crisis when it comes to this kind of journalism, I don’t know…I think it comes down a lot to individual choice and what editors care about or not, or what their ethical standards are or not. And personally I’m just like, “Well, if we’re just promoting the show, then [laughs] what are we doing?” We’re not bringing any more value. That’s not anything different from what the marketing department is doing, so, why—that’s not a worthwhile pursuit.
But where entertainment journalism is, or at least was when I left my staff job a few years ago, that was seemingly a surprise [laughs] to some publicists, which made me think that there are probably reporters for whom that is completely normal and they’re more than happy to just regurgitate whatever the press release or the media-trained quotes are from stars. I don’t know. There’s probably some, you know, if people can make a living with that, [laughs] I’m not here to shame them, but I don’t know if that’s…you know, that’s not good in terms of sustainability of a rich and vibrant cultural criticism practice and community.
And I think that’s kind of been demonstrated as outlets continue to fold. That’s a very complicated issue, but I think it’s part of it. It’s like, if we’ve devalued this work because people aren’t supported to do higher-quality research or criticism or whatever, because we’re in such a churn mentality, then it becomes indistinguishable from some other things, and then people are like, “Why would we need this?” You know? Which is really sad, because I think there’s some really important work that can be done [laughs] when it’s your full-time job, and you’re trained to be a cultural critic or an entertainment reporter.
ELM: Yeah, what do you think—OK, so when you were on staff, you got to write more substantive pieces at Den of Geek, I feel like.
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: But what would you say, I’m trying to estimate, if you have a staff job at a quick-churn kind of place, how many pieces a day do you have to put out? At least a few, right?
KB: I mean, I am aware—like, I pay attention to job postings, and at this point, it’s like, five to seven pieces a day. It’s insane.
FK: Five to seven—
KB: And I don’t know if that’s—that’s what they’re advertising. [ELM laughs] Or, advertising. That’s what they’re asking, in terms of “we’re looking to hire someone.” But I think, I mean, at least a few, which—
FK: So you’re talking about a place that’s like the kind of place that’s just, like, nonstop, like, geek news, where you have—and, I don’t know, there probably is a site called that, but that’s not what I’m referring to. [KB & ELM laugh] I just mean a site that has—
KB: I think even—
FK: —information about all of your favorite sci-fi things and all of your—
ELM: Even like a—no, no, more than that. Like, a New York Magazine vertical.
KB: Yeah.
ELM: I think, you know, they would say, “Oh, you know—” And they’ll say, like, for the edit—I agree with you, that’s probably the right estimate. So the way it works is, usually in media jobs, for a writer job—or an editor job—you do an edit test.
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: Which might mean you have to write an article on spec, or you—which, sometimes they just take, and then they don’t compensate you for, or they kind of—
FK: Ruh-roh. [KB laughs]
ELM: On the editing side, you might have to do an editing test, where they kind of see how you handle something, and for those kinds of jobs, they’re like, “You’re doing a shift.” Right? It’s like you’re gonna—I don’t know if you’ve ever had to do this, Kayti, for a job, but it’s like, “You will be online for this afternoon.”
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: “And you have to react to the news, whatever beat it is.”
KB: Right.
ELM: Whether it’s culture or foreign policy or whatever.
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: And churn out those stories.
KB: Yeah, and I think the aim, or what the company wants is five to seven articles a day. But I think realistically, it’s closer to two to three, which is still a lot.
FK: I’m just trying to think about what, as a fan who consumes media on the internet, [laughs] you know?
KB: Mmm hmm.
FK: And who reads some of these articles, I’m just trying to think about, like, OK, so are we talking about, like, I don’t know. In my brain, this is all about the, like, the things I had to look at when I was looking at Avatar, right? When I was working on that property.
ELM: Sure.
FK: Because I had to read a lot of, like, churny articles for that. [laughs]
KB: Mmm hmm.
FK: And so I’m just thinking about which of these, you know, what falls into what category, right? So it’s like you’re watching everything, and you’re just gonna say, like, “Oh, they issued a press release here, let’s see how much of it I can pull out and make an article out of that from. Oh, there’s this controversy over here. Like, in this case, James Cameron said this thing. How can I make an article out of that?” That’s what you’re talking about? That kind of—
KB: It’s all—yeah, it’s all kinds of articles. I mean, I think if it involves any kind of reporting, that’s probably not the case.
FK: OK.
KB: Like, if you have to call someone, find a source, obviously you are somewhat dependent on other people’s schedules—
FK: Right.
KB: —and them getting back to you, so that’s not super realistic. But I think that’s why you’ve seen, like, a decrease in people actually having reported stories—
FK: [overlapping] Right, that makes sense.
KB: —even when they’re writing about something—
FK: Right.
KB: Yeah, like, the stories you mentioned, those could include additional sources, but they don’t, because of the expectation that’s placed on writers.
ELM: Right.
FK: Right.
KB: They just can’t realistically do that.
FK: It’s literally just, “Here’s a video recording of James Cameron saying this thing, and here’s three Twitter responses.”
KB: Right. Right.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I mean, that’s dating it now a little bit, but not that much. [all laugh]
ELM: Right, and there’s also the, you know, I think Kayti you bringing up the churn element of it too is, it’s new, right? If you think about the way the media was in the year 2000, right? You didn’t need to have seven pieces a day from a single person, right? Because where would they be going?
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: You know? Because you’d be writing, like—you know, it’s still, like, a newspaper reporter a few decades ago would still have to be pretty fast and reactive.
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: But it would be maybe one piece a day, right? You know? And they’d have time to call—
KB: Yeah, and you’re seeing, like, so many different outlets producing what is essentially the same article, which feels like not the most valuable way to spend your resources, if you’re a media company. And there are examples of companies that are able to do far less and, you know, they have a sustainable business model. I think about the Defector, which is a worker-owned outlet, and, you know, they’re producing a lot of work. I don’t know exactly how many articles they publish a day, but when the mindset is “What is a sustainable business model?” versus “What is a way to grow profits?” the quality of work I think goes up a lot, because it is just realistic in a way that, you know, a lot of these people who come from outside of media, who have a lot of money and are looking to make more money, they don’t understand, I think, the business and a lot of them are realizing now that this is not a way to grow—it’s not a way to build profits.
I think it is possible to have a sustainable business model within this industry, but there’s so few examples of that, because…yeah. I mean, this is not my speciality, but from someone who’s a worker in this industry, it seems like that is not working out. People trying to become exponentially more profitable, that’s not something that seems to work within the current internet ecosystem. [laughs]
ELM: Right, well, it’s not—yeah, it’s not just that people want—it’s not about sustainability, it’s about that kind of tech-style extreme growth, right?
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: And it’s like, “Oh, well, if we have 5 million hits a week this quarter, we should be having 50 million next quarter.” Right? You know?
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: And the way to do that is just through brute force. It’s not—
KB: Yeah.
ELM: “Oh, let’s have clever articles, better writing.” You know? It’s like, “Let’s just do more.”
KB: It’s kind of the difference between, like, you know, thinking about TV or whatever, it’s like a casual watcher versus a fan. I don’t know. I’ve always been a fan in everything [laughs] I do. That’s just how I operate as a human. But I think, you know, the Defector seems to work because of subscriptions. People are willing to pay for that, and I think maybe building a community and going after people who are like, “I am willing to invest in this,” versus, “I happened to click on your article.” I mean, they’re two different models, and they are, you know, you can have a hybrid, but—
ELM: But Defector also—and I mean, there are a few other examples like this, and it’s worker-owned, and it’s a trend right now, but Defector is, if people don’t know it, it’s worker-owned, it came out of Deadspin when it was bought by a doofus who just gutted it, but they’re very voicey, right? You know?
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: They have really sharp writers—
KB: And they build brands around those writers, I think.
ELM: Yeah, and they’re really willing to lean into that voicey-ness, right? And have an opinion. It actually reminds me a lot of early Gawker stuff, you know? Where you’re like, “Oh, this is a really fun writer. I want to tune into that.” Right? As opposed to the kind of generic—
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: —churn that a lot of these sites are being forced into, where yeah, it’s just like, “James Cameron said this.” “James Cameron spoke about this.” Right? It’s just variations on the same thing over and over again.
KB: Yeah, there’s, like, an anonymity to it, too, that when companies are trying to replace that with AI—
ELM: Yes.
KB: I mean, there’s problems in general with that, in terms of the quality of what—both in terms of quality and, in my perspective, ethics.
ELM: Burning down small forests every time you write a shitty Marvel list. [laughs]
KB: [laughs] Yes. For example.
FK: Hearing this conversation is interesting to me, though, because it’s making me think about what kinds of journalism fans, broadly speaking, consume and want to consume, and, you know, that voicey-ness being a good or a bad thing, and also the expected audience. So here’s what I mean by that. This is making me think about things like The A.V. Club, right? And so forth.
ELM: Mmm hmm.
FK: Quite voicey, [laughs] you know? Or Television Without Pity.
ELM: Television—yeah, for sure.
FK: You know? Similar, both of which are, “OK we’re just going to be covering—we’re gonna be covering sort of TV and film, right? Overall, and we’re gonna have an opinion, and we’re gonna have a stance on these things.” And so that’s something that a lot of people, I think, are interested in, and maybe they’re not interested in every piece of the television coverage, but it’s also not this sort of deep—how can I put this? A fan of a particular thing may, you know, they’re probably going to follow their thing on there, but they may not be interested in all of that TV coverage, right?
KB: Mmm hmm.
FK: And similarly, a fan may be—they may want to hear that James Cameron said this doofus-y thing, and not care about the voicy-ness of it, but also be—but then they may be also getting that from social media, right? So I think I’m just interested in thinking about this as “the fan as consumer of media,” because it seems to me that there’s, like—and then similarly, the problem with the “James Cameron said this tiny thing” is that there’s only five people who care.
KB: I love that this is our example. [laughs]
FK: Yeah, well, look, he says a lot of things. He says a lot of things.
ELM: He said blue people had tits? Is that maybe the one that we’re gonna go with?
FK: Sure, I mean, whatever. He says a lot of things. I really admire the man, actually, despite his many things that he says, so, there we go. James Cameron, please don’t send ninjas after me. What I say is true. But… [FK & ELM laugh]
Anyway, I’m just thinking about sort of the—and then also the idea of exponential growth suggests that everybody cares what James Cameron said, and/or that if you cover every topic, you’ll get enough of the three people who are [laughs] that it’ll somehow be worth it. It just doesn’t—the math doesn’t seem to math to me, and it also doesn’t seem to me that any one of these things is going to give all of the pieces of something that a fan of, for instance, a particular TV show is going to want.
KB: Yeah. I agree with that, and that’s something that, you know, before I left Den of Geek, I had started covering Korean pop culture, because I was like, this is a huge, you know, there’s so many different fanbases that exist within this, you know, media industry, [laughs] national media industry. And they’re not really being catered to by U.S. outlets, and I think a lot of that is that there, you know, are fewer people doing it and fewer resources within those outlets, and there’s more media even just within the U.S. So it’s just like, “We don’t have time for this.”
But when I started to cover that, I also was like, you know, I think disenfranchised fandoms, or fandoms that haven’t been taken seriously or catered to by mainstream entertainment are also very suspicious of mainstream entertainment, and being like, “Well, why would I listen to you? Because so much of what you’ve published in the past has been infantilizing or just ignorant, or you just don’t take it seriously.”
So I think that has been kind of an interesting thing as well, is, like, I don’t know. What do you have to offer or how do you prove to that fandom or these fanbases that you actually understand something, or you have something to offer that isn’t already happening within those fandoms? Because those fandoms have grown and evolved without mainstream coverage, because they haven’t had it. So they’re like, “Well, how do we create this for ourselves?”
And I feel like you’ve definitely seen that, especially within K-pop fandom and with BTS, where there’s, like, Twitter accounts or whatever it is now, who are just responsible for being like, “Here’s the news from Korean media.” Or, “Here are the things that you need to know about.” Because it hasn’t been covered. It’s been completely left out by these outlets.
ELM: Well, this brings us to your piece, and there’s two different directions I want to go from what you just said, and I’m not sure which one to go for first. Maybe I’ll just tell you both, and you tell me.
KB: OK, I’m ready.
FK: It’s a choose-your-own-adventure. [KB laughs]
ELM: Yeah, that’s right. We’re gonna get there eventually. But so, you know, in your piece, you talk about—and I’ve had this experience so many times not about, you know, Korean media, but—not about that. [laughs] You know, but trying to justify—
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: —a fan-related story to an editor. Trying to sell it. Trying to be like, “Trust me. People care about this, I swear to God,” you know? Which is some of what you talk about. And there’s another level of it, when it’s pitching to American outlets about Korean media, of course.
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: But the other thing I would love to talk about is kind of the other side of the spectrum, and I think you see it a lot in K-pop, in particular, fans’ antipathy towards the media.
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: Not just because of the infantilizing thing, but, you know, it’s not unique to them, but that kind of stan culture-y hatred of any—it’s not even critique, you know? We’ve seen people getting death threats because they mentioned, like, six out of the seven names, right? You know?
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: There’s this general misunderstanding of what journalism is—
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: —compared to a fan activity, and so those are the two routes I would like to go, so you can pick one first.
KB: OK, well I don’t remember the first one, because I’m so distracted by your second one. [ELM laughs] So I guess I’ll go with that one.
ELM: All right.
KB: But this is something I definitely think a lot about, and I feel like it’s not just like, “What is a journalist?” It’s also, “What is a fan?” Because I am both, and I think that, to me, being a fan is not always going along with a celebrity or a story or whatever. Whatever they say or do, whatever direction the story takes, whatever direction the creators decide they, you know, want to take the story.
To me, fannishness has always been just about engaging deeply with a story, or whatever the fandom is. And part of that is also thinking critically about it, and I do think that it is upsetting and disappointing to see [laughs] when, you know, people—and I don’t think this is just fandom. I think we see it with political parties as well, and I think that trend is really interesting, because it’s obviously something that’s bigger than fandom. I mean, you can think of political parties as like fandom in some way, but the idea that whatever this person or story or property or whatever, whatever they do, I’m going to fit it into the story of “they’re good” or “they’re important” or “they’re the best” or whatever, regardless. It’s not about taking in that new information and then thinking about how it makes me feel or how it changes how I think about the story or the person or whatever as a whole. It’s like, it doesn’t matter. You just fit it into this narrative.
And that does feel bigger than fandom. I do think it can come up in K-pop fandom, maybe more obviously than in other fandoms, just because K-pop fandom is so strong and so massive. It is hard, because it’s like, it’s important than we’re able to have conversations [laughs] and I think a lot of times, this all-or-nothing thinking, it just shuts down conversations, and I think fandoms have the power or potential to be places where we can actually organize across also national borders, which feels very important in this world.
And to not be able to have those conversations as freely because people are, you know, shutting down any sort of critical conversation, even in some of the gentlest ways. It’s not even like, “I’m not gonna be a fan of this TV show or this K-pop band” or whatever. I just want to talk about this thing and how it’s making me feel. You know, there’s a spectrum of conversations. There’s some people who are like, “I’m not gonna be a fan of this story or this K-pop group anymore because of this thing.”
Those conversations are just like, they’re a lot harder to have, and that feels…I don’t know. That feels somewhat new, as someone who is in their late 30s and has been on the internet for a while.
ELM: Yeah.
KB: But I don’t think it’s specific to fandom, but I think it is super interesting to look at within fandom, especially because even though people can really be hurt and there can be some very serious consequences that come out of this behavior, it still feels a little less intense than political [KB & ELM laugh] fandom, and some of these other issues.
ELM: Yeah. I mean, I feel like, I guess, you know, and I don’t want to pin this on music fandoms, right? You know? And I want to clarify, too, just to make sure, I’m not pinning this at all on K-pop—
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: —because I’ve seen this around, say, Taylor Swift.
KB: Mmm hmm. [laughs]
ELM: Or some other big American artists.
KB: Yeah, which it is, like, there’s real people, I think, which is a thing that feels somewhat different.
ELM: Yeah.
KB: I mean, there’s real people who are making TV shows or whatever, movies, but—
ELM: But yeah, and you’re getting different fan cultures clashing around that.
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: But it also does obviously connect, for me, on the media side, you know, for years now, we’ve been hearing defensive directors saying, “We made this for the fans, not for the critics.” [FK laughs] Right? You know, right? And I think it all ties back to you talking, and I want to talk about this with you, because you do this kind of entertainment reporting, the access piece, too, right? And this idea of, like, well, if you want to stay on a studio’s list, if you want to stay in these directors’ good graces or the PR person for the music group or whatever, you’re gonna say the nicest regurgitating things—
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: —because you don’t want to anger the creators, and you don’t want to anger the fans, right?
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: You know? And then that just kind of—
KB: [overlapping] And a lot of times, you might be a fan of the creators, which adds this other component of… [laughs]
ELM: Right! And then you have to come at them and be like, “Actually, I think the movie you just made was quite bad, and this is very—”
KB: Right. [laughs]
ELM: It’s the same, it’s an emotion that a fan faces—
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: —when the new season comes out and it sucks, you know? [FK laughs] And you’re like, “Oh no.” You know?
KB: Like, “Oh, I wish this had been better.” [KB & ELM laugh]
ELM: Right? But so, like, you know, criticism is a different realm from reporting, obviously, right?
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: I guess to clarify for, because Flourish is asking these questions about these different lines, but right? Like, a critic—
FK: Thank you!
ELM: [laughs] You know, a critic—
KB: I do think there is, like—I think that confusion is appropriate, because I think there’s increasingly overlap. Or, there can be overlap between those two things as well.
ELM: Absolutely, and there’s so few outlets for criticism, which is, like, you know, criticism has always had these issues, where the artist will be like, “Critics are hacks, and they’ve never had an original thought in their lives!” Or whatever. That kind of anger, and trying to get the public on their side—
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: —to be like, “Don’t listen to this clown who says I’m doing a bad job.” Right? But I feel, like, I don’t know. I feel like a lot of journalists are kind of culpable in this situation.
KB: Mmm.
ELM: But the compensation’s so low—
FK: Right.
ELM: —that it’s like, what do you—just doing it for $200, because you gotta pay your bills? You know?
FK: And I’m gonna propose—I mean, coming from a non-journalist fan perspective, I do think that there is also the element of, it’s true, and Kayti was sort of saying this before, that sometimes you do have a critic who is uninterested in engaging with the premise of the thing, [laughs] you know?
ELM: Sure, sure.
FK: And so I think that of course then the problem is that people begin to think that every critic is [laughs] uninterested in engaging with the premise of the thing.
KB: Mmm hmm.
FK: Which is not true. But when you get a critic who’s like, “Well, obviously, you know, K-pop just sucks because it’s boybands,” and you’re like, “Well, gee, that seems like a bad critic.” [laughs] You know?
KB: Seems like you’re not even doing your job. [laughs]
FK: Right! Right.
ELM: Yeah. No, or the flip side, like, The New York Times film critics, every time there’s a frickin’ Marvel movie—well, not so much anymore. But for a while, they were like, “Well, it’s great! Great. You know, like, it’s the best that these things can be.” [KB laughs] And it’s like, these things, there’s a wide range—
FK: Exactly. [laughs]
ELM: —and why can’t we just take it as a—I gotta say, Richard Brody, from The New Yorker, love him. I wildly disagree with him 90 percent of the time, but he takes every single—it’s like, Ant-Man 2—
FK: He does.
ELM: He’s in it. He’s takin’ it so seriously.
FK: Yes.
ELM: Right?
FK: Yes.
ELM: And you’re like—
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: “God bless you, Richard. Thank you.” [laughs]
FK: Exactly! Like, you could—whatever. I kind of don’t care whether your perspective is right or wrong if I think that you’re genuinely in it. But anyway, I just wanted to drop that in, because I feel like that’s the other piece of this, too, is like, I think that that can become something that as a—it seems to me like if you are a fan and a journalist, that you could lead yourself to believe that, like, “Well, I really get it.” [laughs] You know?
KB: Hmm. Mmm hmm.
FK: But also, sometimes people are bad, because they don’t get it. [laughs]
KB: Yeah. I mean, and I think, like, increasingly as the industry becomes more and more unstable, I mean, hopefully it’ll turn around. [laughs] But it’s like, the things that feel—
ELM: Yeah, hopefully. [laughs]
KB: The things that feel more stable are, like, fanbases that are or aren’t following your work, or publicists who are like, “Oh, I want to, you know—are you pitching to places?” It’s just a weird situation [laughs] to be in. And I think it’s interesting, because I feel like the people who don’t actually do their job, at least, you know, using the example of, like, just completely not engaging with K-pop, because they don’t think it’s interesting or important, those are often the people who have the most job security. [laughs]
ELM: Yup.
KB: And I don’t know…
ELM: Like the New York Times film critics? Yes. [laughs]
KB: Exactly. Exactly. The things that are hardest for me to write are the ones that I care the most about, and they’re oftentimes the things I’m paid the least for, and I think the less I’m paid for something, the more I feel like, well, I’m doing this for other reasons, so I really want to get it right, which creates this whole, like, terrible— [laughs] I mean, not terrible. I’ve produced some work that I’m proud of in this [ELM laughs] scenario, or in this—
FK: Sure.
KB: —kind of process, but…
ELM: You think—would it be helpful if we also gave a little bit of insight to people, because I think people have no idea how much freelance journalism—even staff journalism—pays, right?
FK: Not only would I think that would be helpful, I think it would also be helpful just to talk through the process of, like, coming up with a piece and—
ELM: Well, do you want to go back to Part 1 of my question earlier—
KB: [laughs] I don’t remember.
ELM: —which was about convincing—
FK: Yes!
ELM: All right! Let’s wind it back.
FK: I do think that a lot people, myself included, have a vague sense of this, and obviously, I’ve learned more from you over the years, Elizabeth. But even so, I think that the majority of people, even if they have some sense of how this works, it still feels pretty mysterious, and it’s hard to just know how that sausage gets made, so I would love to hear about that.
ELM: All right, and to reiterate, that Part 1 question was about convincing editors that a fandom story or, like, an entertainment story that’s related to your fannish interest is worthy of covering.
KB: Yeah.
ELM: To bring us back to your article, too.
KB: Yeah.
FK: Also, I’m sorry for saying “how the sausage gets made,” Elizabeth. I know that’s a meat metaphor [KB laughs] and you don’t like them.
ELM: Wow, you’re right. That did—I didn’t even register it, and now that you’ve—
FK: [overlapping] I know you didn’t, and I told on myself.
KB: [overlapping] I’m glad we circled back around to it.
ELM: You drew attention to it, and now you’ve triggered me, and I’m mad about it, so…
FK: Sorry. [laughs] Aren’t you glad that I noticed, though? It’s like when someone—
ELM: Thank you, you’re learning. It’s how the falafel gets made actually, so… [KB & ELM laugh]
FK: How the falafel gets made!
KB: I love falafel!
ELM: Yeah, that’s right.
FK: It could be fake-meat sausage, but you would find that even more offensive, so…
ELM: That’s right, I would.
KB: You just keep digging. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah. [all laugh]
KB: These questions actually feel somewhat unrelated to me. [laughs] Because I think [ELM laughs] the article—so the article we’re talking about, the one that I wrote for Fansplaining, is about the death—or actually temporary death of the article, because I was able to find a spot for it later.
ELM: That’s related to how an article gets made!
KB: Yeah.
ELM: So let’s walk them through it.
KB: Yeah, but it feels somewhat less relevant to a lot of the work I do, because it was higher-paid than most things.
ELM: Mmm.
KB: Which also feels like maybe related, that, I don’t know, a lot of prestige organizations—or at least, this has been my experience—it’s even harder to get fan—
ELM: Yes.
KB: —fandom stuff [laughs] greenlit by them, which is frustrating, because to me, it’s like, you know, we’re talking about this with extreme tribalism within fandom and, you know, how it crosses over into political stuff, where it’s like, these are things that are not removed from the world, you know? These are things that are real and manifest. They’re manifesting in fandom, but they’re telling us things about the broader world. And in terms of Korean pop culture, to me, one of the reasons why it’s so interesting is because for so long, American, English-language pop culture has had such a chokehold on global pop culture. Like, that’s been it. And I wonder what are the forces, and what does it tell us about the world that not only Korean pop culture, but other kinds of foreign language pop culture, have become more popular, and people are seeking it out instead.
But to answer Flourish’s— [laughs]
FK: I was gonna say, this is still not answering the question, how do you get to the point of trying to get it greenlit?
KB: [laughs] I’m trying to do it all!
ELM: [overlapping] I think these are related, because—yeah. All right, well, start at the beginning. All right, we’re both freelance journalists right now.
KB: Yes. So generally, editors will send out calls for pitches, and/or you have a preexisting relationship with an editor. That’s a best-case scenario, because it means you’re probably going to have to spend less time formulating a pitch, which basically just like, “I want to write this story. Here’s my idea. Here are potentially the sources I want to contact.”
ELM: I will say, I’m gonna toss in a perspective as an editor here too, right? So pitches, very interesting to receive. [KB laughs] They vary widely.
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: Sometimes people send you pitches that are, like, five paragraphs long.
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: It’s like, as long as the article is gonna be, and I’m like, “What are we doing here?” You know?
KB: [laughing] Yeah.
ELM: And some people like that. I don’t know, but like—
KB: I feel like I’ve done both ends of the spectrum. [ELM laughs] I tend to go too much, where I’m just like—and I know, I’m like, “This is too much. They don’t need this much information. They’re not gonna read all of it.” [laughs]
ELM: And sometimes they want that. So it varies widely, and a lot of sites will have, like, if they do take pitches from—like, cold pitches, as we would say, right? From a freelancer, a lot of them have a guide to pitching. It’s really helpful when they’re like, “Here’s an example.” Sites will say, like, “Here’s an example of a successful pitch that we received.” Right?
KB: Hmm.
ELM: And it’s a link to a Google Doc. I love that stuff. Just so you can see, what are their vibes? Or they will highlight stories they’ve published and be like, “We’re looking for this kind of story or this kind of story.” And then you could really see and tailor your pitch to them.
KB: Yeah, and I was a freelancer, like, 10 years ago when I started in this industry, and I’m a freelancer now, and the amount of resources that are available for freelancers is so much better. [laughs]
ELM: Oh yeah. Absolutely.
KB: Even if, you know, even if things are harder in some ways.
ELM: No, and I’m sure you’ve had this experience, but when I was starting, like, 15 years ago, you know, you had to get through, like, word of mouth—
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: —to say, “Oh, here’s an email address of someone.” You know? And it’s like, and then you’d have to go back and forth with them and be like, “I was recommended by this person—”
KB: Yeah.
ELM: “Please, take my idea!”
KB: Which also just makes it less accessible, because it’s like, you have to know someone—
ELM: Definitely.
KB: —to get even that email address.
ELM: Right, exactly.
KB: But I think especially within nerd journalism, [laughs] which is kind of where I ended up spending a lot of my time and coming out of, the amount you can get paid for an article is, like, I feel like it’s anywhere from $100 to $300. It’s really low, especially when you take into account you’re paying taxes on that. So basically just take 30 percent off from whatever you’re getting. [laughs]
ELM: I’m pretty sure that some of these sites are paying, like, literally $25 an article.
KB: Yes.
ELM: Some of these—
KB: $50, $30…
ELM: —kind of janky, quick-hit nerd websites, right?
KB: Yeah.
ELM: Geek news kind of stuff, right?
KB: Yeah. And when you break it down to hourly, sometimes you’re writing for less than minimum wage. And also, a huge problem is how long it can take to get paid, and how uncertain that process is as well. So it’s like maybe you are, you know, making enough to survive, but then—to pay your bills—but then you don’t get paid when you’re supposed to and then there’s no one—like, there’s no real information about when you will get paid.
So that is another thing that if you don’t come from—if you don’t either have another job, have a partner who has another job, maybe, or have your own class privilege, it’s nearly impossible to do this. Which then also—there’s been so much talk, I think this was, like, honestly more a few years ago, where it was like, there was a push, at least superficially, to create more—to bring in more diverse voices. But there was no talk about what that looked like in terms of logistics, like, in terms of just supporting people to be able to do this work. It was just like, “We need more people of color, we need more women.” Whoever it is. But it’s like, “OK, but these are not conditions in which people who are statistically, like, have less resources—they’re not gonna be able to do this.” [laughs]
ELM: “We’ll pay you $250 when we pay you.” Like, “Come on in!” You know? [laughs]
KB: Right, maybe. Like, “We’ll pay you $50 when we’ll pay you.”
FK: So basically, you find an editor, you find their email address, and you send them—
ELM: No, no. A lot of publications that take cold pitches will have, like, a slushpile kind of email address.
FK: Sure, right right. There’s a slushpile email—
ELM: Yeah.
FK: —or you happen to know someone.
KB: There’s a lot of, like, email newsletters that will compile—
FK: Yeah.
KB: —calls for pitches from various editors.
FK: Right.
KB: And they’ll send out, “Here are all the people who are actively looking for stories.”
FK: Right. That’s sort of what I meant. Like, you identify a place that is likely to be receptive—
KB: Mmm hmm.
FK: —and then you write a pitch, which is usually pretty short—
KB: [laughs] Maybe.
FK: —and then you send it off, and hopefully they say yes.
ELM: Maybe. [laughs]
FK: Maybe. Maybe short. I know. I heard that. And then you send it off, and then they come back to you and they say, because we’re in fantasy land—
KB: [overlapping] $20! [KB & ELM laugh]
FK: They say— [laughs] We’re in fantasy land. They say, like, $200, because we’re in fantasy land—
ELM: OK, no, to clarify, I don’t—sorry.
FK: [laughs] What happens?
ELM: There’s a big range.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And I think it’s important to say that some of these publications are paying that little, because when fans come at journalists—
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: —and they’re like, “You’re in the pocket of Big Studio!” It’s like, for $200?
FK: Yeah. [laughs]
ELM: You think that I’m enduring this harassment?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But, you know, I should say for the record that the publications I’m writing for now, I get paid more than that, right? You know? I’m usually writing…I usually write for places that pay at least $0.50 a word.
KB: Yeah, because that’s, like, another—I feel like once you get into, like, $0.50 a word—when you’re talking about per word, that’s usually kind of the next level up. [laughs] You know?
ELM: Yeah, I mean, I have been a journalist for a long time, and you know, you basically can calculate out, like, how much do they want? How much time is this gonna take me? I just want to clarify that it’s not like every single freelance, or journalist you see is making $200 per article.
FK: Right, right.
ELM: Right? There is a much bigger range.
FK: Right. There’s a huge range, OK.
ELM: And if you’re a staff writer, you could make anywhere from $50K to $150K, right? It’s a huge range.
FK: Right. So they give you the amount that they’re going to pay, and then you have to write the article. And you write the article and you send it to them?
ELM: No.
FK: What happens?
ELM: No. [laughs] Here’s what happens, Flourish.
KB: What happens?
ELM: Here’s what happens, is you pitch, and I think a lot of the time, and I would say this—Kayti, I don’t know if this has been your experience—but as an editor and a writer, a lot of the time what happens is people have an idea, but they don’t have an argument. This is where it comes in to convincing people, also, of a fannish topic, that it’s worthwhile, right? “This is important to people in fandom. Why don’t you see that it could be a success?” Right? A lot of editors will come at your idea, and they’ll say, “What’s the hook? What’s the angle?”
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: “Does this fit into our general priorities for the next few months? Can I see the headline? Can I see how this is gonna play out?” And then I’ll say as an editor, a lot of times people will be like, “I want to write about X.” And it’s like, “Write what?” You know?
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: And even if they have a whole paragraph describing what X is, if I don’t actually think that you’re gonna have an argument driving the piece, then I’m like, “What’s the reader gonna get out of this, beyond a recitation of facts, right?” And so I think that’s the kind of back and forth that will happen in any editorial situation, you know?
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: Even if you have an established relationship with the editor.
KB: I do think this can—I don’t know. I think that I struggle in relation to this, because I do think it’s important to have an argument, to have some sort of, like, [ELM laughs] you’re not just writing about a topic, because then you can just read the Wikipedia page. But—
ELM: Yeah. Also, to clarify, when I say “argument,” it doesn’t have to be, like, combative, right? [KB laughs] I just mean, like, you know, if I was like, “What’s this about?”
KB: Yeah, what are we learning?
ELM: And I would want to be able to say it in a tweet—
KB: Right.
ELM: What’s the sell? Why am I reading this, you know?
KB: But I do think that because there’s so few—or can feel like there’s so few resources, I don’t know. There can be less room for—if it’s more reported, at least for me, I want to somewhat learn about what that—like, I don’t know yet.
ELM: Yes.
KB: I’m going to talk to people who know more about this than I do, who are embedded in this community or whatever the thing is we’re talking about. So I think that can be tricky, too. And I completely understand editors being like, “I don’t just want to commission you talking about whatever for 1,200 words.” But I think especially if you haven’t worked with an editor before, having that conversation around, “Well, this is something that I’m going to explore, and I don’t actually want to do all this work before I know that I’m going to get paid for it, because otherwise, I am not gonna be able to maintain this as a career.” [laughs]
ELM: I absolutely agree. This is a huge problem on both ends.
KB: Hmm.
ELM: Because you want to say, “Oh yeah, figure out where the story is as you research.”
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: But it’s like, you know, you don’t want to ask someone to do that for free, right?
KB: Right.
ELM: And I don’t want to be asked to do that for free. But I think that’s a huge bind.
KB: Yeah.
ELM: And so then you have journalists coming in with kind of pre-packaged, sort of easy—
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: —pitches that they know, and that’s why you get a lot of generic stuff.
FK: Right.
KB: Which is why having more staff I think can be helpful, because it’s like, that’s something that you’re doing as a staff person, that you are getting paid for, because you have a salary.
ELM: Exactly.
KB: And you can do that research and figure it out as you go, and know that it’s going to be worth it.
FK: That’s really interesting to me, because it makes me think about how many times I have seen a bad story about a fandom, right? And thinking about what that person was thinking and doing, and the answer is—
ELM: Was it in The New York Times, Flourish?
KB: Did they write fanfiction as two words? [FK laughs]
ELM: Oh, even the good publications are still doing that. [laughs]
FK: Yeah, they’re all still doing that. See my fight with Merriam Webster continuing to be my arch nemesis. I will never be OK with it.
ELM: I’m proud that I’ve stopped apologizing for it in my tweets about my articles. I’ve been like, if anyone is questioning whether I know, at this point…
FK: Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. Sorry MW, you’re dead to me forever for this reason.
ELM: Wow. [laughs]
KB: For now. [laughs]
FK: It’s an organization, not—yeah, until you figure it out, you’re gone. But yeah, it’s making me think of some of the sort of really lazy, in my opinion, articles about fandom that I have read and realizing that if you don’t have the mental space in what you’re getting paid to do, to actually think about something— [laughs]
KB: Mmm hmm.
FK: —then why would you ever learn about it beyond what your stereotypes are, right? How would you ever, you know, how would that article ever be better, if this person is not—
KB: [overlapping] I mean, I feel this way about media, too. And I feel like this is [ELM laughs] something that became more clear with the writers’ strike, where it was like, yeah, I mean, if you’re not supported in doing, in creating a thing, then why would it be good? [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
KB: [overlapping] If these are the conditions?
FK: That’s an issue with those writers, because I feel like they maybe shouldn’t do it, but that’s because I care about it and… [laughs]
ELM: I also think this back and forth we’re having about pitching and whether you have the idea fully formed before you start writing, is actually pretty illustrative of what you’re describing, because especially in a place like The New York Times newspaper, you really get the sense from some of these fandom pieces they do…what’s that phrase? Like, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail?
FK: [overlapping] Yes, everything looks like a nail! [laughs]
KB: Mmm hmm.
FK: It’s so real, though.
ELM: Often these are written by people they have really established relationships with.
FK: Yes.
ELM: Some of their staff writers or their frequent contributors.
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: And you can tell that they kind of came in with a, “I’m seeing people kind of doing this, and I’m getting a vibe from here, so…” You know? And it doesn’t feel—it feels like they came in with this kind of overarching idea. Yeah, I mean, I feel fine calling them out by name, because they’ve been doing this for years, and it sucks, right? That’s not a model, I think. But it sucks because they’re such a visible place, right?
FK: And because I think people assume that The New York Times actually does reporting on things—
KB: Yeah.
FK: —and people have the mental space—
KB: I mean, they have resources, so...
FK: You know? [laughs]
KB: I think it’s frustrating when that happens. [laughs]
ELM: Did you see that—was it a tweet? Flourish, were you telling me about this? I saw it in the wild, it was, someone said, like, “Every New York Times article, you think sounds really smart until they write one about something you actually know about.”
FK: It’s so real, though. [all laugh] It’s so real!
ELM: OK, it’s not just them.
FK: At least in the cultural criticism realm, you know?
KB: Yeah.
FK: For sure there. I don’t know about—I’m not—I don’t know enough about the news reporting thing to feel like, you know—
ELM: Yeah, or their climate change reporters or whatever. Yeah. [laughs]
FK: Right, I’m sure they’re fine. It’s only when it’s, you know…
ELM: Yes.
KB: Well, let’s not say we’re sure they’re fine. Let’s just say, “We don’t know.” [laughs]
ELM: Mmm hmm.
FK: Yeah, OK, that’s a good point. But yes. [laughs]
ELM: Good, good.
KB: It does feel like this is somewhat related, I don’t know, I’ve been thinking a lot about, there’s been a few K-pop festivals that have fallen through in the last few months, and just in general, I think people saw the popularity of certain K-pop groups, especially BTS, during the pandemic and coming out of the pandemic, in America, and these people who don’t actually understand K-pop or K-pop fandom and are like, “Well, if we book any K-pop group, everyone’s gonna come.” And it’s like, “OK, but there’s more nuance to it than that. There’s a lot of diversity within this music industry and within these different kinds of fandoms.”
ELM: Yeah.
KB: It’s just this kind of ignorance that I think especially when you’re applying it to—I mean, definitely foreign-language industries, but in general, anything that isn’t catered towards that white, male mainstream, it’s like, yeah. There can be this hubris that [KB & ELM laugh] gets in the way of people actually making sound financial decisions. [laughs]
FK: Yeah, for sure. OK, so what happens after this? You’ve—
ELM: So you’ve agreed with your editor—I gotta clarify one more thing, too. One thing that I think that a lot of people who aren’t journalists don’t know is, even if you’re not a staff writer, often journalists wind up having relationships with editors. So Kayti, I don’t know if you have this experience right now with any editors, but you know, I have a relationship with an editor at WIRED, I pitch to her.
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: But sometimes she writes to me and says—
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: “This story came across my radar.”
KB: That’s, like, ideal, in my mind.
ELM: It’s the best. So that’s what you want, right? You want someone who can trust you—
FK: Shout out to Elizabeth’s editor that she has a relationship with. [KB & ELM laugh] Thank you, person, for being the best.
ELM: Right. And I think a lot of journalists—I feel this way, maybe you do too, Kayti—I really, if it’s a story, I like to be assigned a story.
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: It’s like a little homework assignment, and you’re like—
KB: Yeah!
ELM: “I’ll go find the right person to talk to about that!”
KB: Yeah, because if you’re a journalist, it’s like, it’s not just that you have a knowledge base. You might not. You have the skills to find out, to ask questions, to research—
ELM: Right.
KB: —to organize that information in a way that makes sense to people who might also not know about this subject.
ELM: And I think that people underestimate, like, in freelance journalism particularly, pitching is exhausting.
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: Constantly coming up with ideas and sending them to multiple people and always, you know—
KB: And so many of them you don’t hear back about.
ELM: Right.
KB: So it’s just like you’re, you can spend days pitching stories—
ELM: Or you go back and forth—
KB: Yeah.
ELM: —and then eventually they’re like, “Eh, not for us.” Right?
KB: Yeah.
ELM: You know?
FK: OK, OK, you are now commiserating. I want to come back to what’s happening.
ELM: We’re trying to let you know what it’s like, Flourish. [KB laughs]
FK: OK, but I want to know what’s happening with this article.
ELM: So you agreed you’re gonna write it. If it’s at a big corporation, ideally you’ll sign a contract then. A lot of smaller places don’t do contracts, which is not great, because what happens if your editor quits or gets laid off, which happens all the time.
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: Or gets shuffled around, and you get shuffled around.
KB: Yeah, I had an article that was supposed to be published, and then I found out on Twitter that the editor was laid off, and I literally was like…
ELM: Because you didn’t have a contract, right?
KB: No.
ELM: So that’s dangerous. [laughs]
KB: Yup, fun.
ELM: So you’re already taking that precarity in. But say they didn’t get laid off and you’re moving forward with the story. [laughs]
FK: So now you write it! Right?
KB: You write it. You write it. Usually there’s a deadline. There’s a draft deadline, and you’ve agreed to a certain fee at this point, and you pass your article in hopefully by the draft deadline. And they give—
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah! You always hit your deadlines.
KB: [laughs] Yeah, of course. There’s usually a certain amount of, like, back and forth about, you know, here are the edits, OK, I’ll adjust them, I’ll incorporate them, or if, you know, you disagree with them, a conversation about why you feel strongly that it should be this way. Maybe there’s additional sources that you reach out to, to answer questions that the editor had to make the piece stronger. The article we’re talking about, that I wrote about in my story is, this was the case, but I will say that the vast majority of the articles I’ve written have not had an editor.
ELM: Interesting.
KB: Yeah, which is scary. [laughs]
ELM: That is scary. So they’ve just been published.
KB: And also easier. Scary and easier.
ELM: Yeah, that’s interesting and bums me out, because I love editors. [laughs]
KB: Yeah. I agree, and I’ve edited other people’s work, and it’s a very valuable and important skill, and I think it’s scary, especially if you’re writing about more complex topics, to not have another pair of eyes, like, critical—who’s good at that, to give you feedback and to make the piece stronger. Any piece can be made stronger with a good editor.
ELM: I also feel like with fandom journalism, and I wonder if you see this with fannish topics in entertainment, if your editor is not a fandom person, it’s interesting to see what they come back at you with—
KB: Hmm.
ELM: —and the mis—sometimes they’ll do edits and you’ll be like, “Oh, you didn’t understand this thing about fandom at all.”
KB: Right.
ELM: And then you’re like, “Well, I guess I need to be more clear.”
KB: Which also becomes a thing, too, of, like, where is this person, this editor, in relation to the audience?
ELM: Yeah.
KB: Which is always a question, and also not a question that people can always answer, because especially if you’re writing about something that maybe the outlet has not written as much about before, maybe they’re hoping to attract a new audience. So then it’s like, OK, maybe this is something that readers are going to understand. I don’t know. That’s always…it’s tricky. [laughs]
FK: No, that makes absolute sense, because I’ve definitely encountered cases where I’m like, “Surely the average person [KB laughs] who is going to click on this article is going to know what that means, but I guess they didn’t think so.” [laughs] You know?
KB: Yeah.
ELM: Yeah, and you have to pick your battles—
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: —and decide what you’re going to argue about, too, I feel like, you know? I feel like, if you have a good relationship with an editor, and you build up trust, and you don’t throw a tantrum every time they want to do an edit— [laughs]
KB: Right.
ELM: —then you’re allowed to have a few vetoes, to say, “Oh no, fans really would not appreciate the way that was rephrased.” Right?
KB: Yeah, in relation to this article I wrote about for Fansplaining, I hadn’t worked with the editor before, and I actually really enjoyed working with them, I thought they were a really good editor. And there was a second editor that came in kind of at the end of the process who hadn’t been working—for weeks, like, we had been working for weeks on making this clearer and more concise, and the edits they made were kind of—they were just shifting the article in a way that not only was not the article I wanted to write, but was not the article that from the interviews I’d had with sources was true [laughs] to their experiences.
Which is really frustrating, because I think my instinct, as someone who has imposter syndrome, and who was writing—you know, working kind of like—I was getting paid more for this article than most articles, and it was exciting for me to be working on this. You know, I was like, “Well, they must know.” And having to actually trust that I had information or knowledge or insights that they didn’t, or that they maybe had biases that were working against this article? I don’t know. It was messy, and I still—I feel good about where it ended up. I would have rather it not be published in that way than be published in a way that felt like, I don’t know. Dishonest or not true, or at the very least not interesting to me as like… [KB & ELM laugh]
FK: So would then for you, you have to walk away from that money, or maybe there’s—
KB: Yeah.
FK: OK, this is the one thing that I know about. There might be a kill fee? [ELM laughs]
KB: Yes.
FK: In the contract?
KB: Yeah, if you’ve signed a contract, which you should, and I don’t always do—
FK: This is a word that I know. [laughs] If you’ve signed a contract, there might be a fee if they decide to not run the article that you get?
ELM: Sometimes.
FK: Sometimes.
ELM: Sometimes there’s a kill fee, but sometimes there’s just a “if we kill it, we release it back to you.”
KB: Hmm.
FK: Right.
ELM: “You can shop it elsewhere.”
FK: You can shop it elsewhere, OK.
ELM: If they are going to own it, then they do need to pay you to just kill it, and they literally will kill it, right? If they don’t give it back to you.
FK: So that it won’t be run anywhere else.
ELM: So it’ll just, like, die in the ground.
KB: Yeah, this was, like, kind of another part of the situation, which was, they were originally going to pay me the full amount, because I had worked on it so much, and literally it was going to be published that afternoon, when they killed it.
ELM: Wow.
KB: But I really wanted it to exist. [laughs] So I negotiated a lower kill fee so that I could pitch it elsewhere.
FK: Right.
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: OK, that makes lots of sense.
KB: Yeah.
FK: So that—but that’s interesting, because then if you have a contract without such a fee or if the fee is low, then the journalist is put in a position where they have to decide whether that money in their pocket is worth it to them—
KB: Yeah.
FK: —to be honest, or whether, you know— [laughs]
KB: Which is really hard at that point in the process as well, because I had already prioritized that article. I had already put in all of those hours knowing that I was going to get a certain amount.
FK: Right.
KB: And for that to then be maybe not true—
ELM: All of this makes me want to draw the parallel between also the thing that you were describing earlier with the access to the actual creators and the artists and the publicity folks, right? You want to toe the line there so you don’t alienate them, and then this is a situation where, with the editors—
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: You don’t want to alienate them, because you want to work with them in the future, and you don’t want to be seen as difficult or, like, you know, throwing a tantrum about the way that the piece was getting removed or whatever, right? You want to seem agreeable.
KB: Yeah.
ELM: And that’s—how do you toe all these lines at once, right?
KB: Yeah. And I think in this case, inevitably, I was kind of glad when they killed it, because I was feeling increasingly not good about the situation, because the people that I felt the most responsibility to were the sources. The people I’d interviewed. Because that feels like they’ve given me their time, and in this case they were people who, I don’t know. They’re not, like, celebrities. They weren’t people who have an incredible amount of power, so that’s a vulnerable process, to talk to a journalist.
ELM: Right.
KB: So those were the people I felt most responsible to and for, and so I’m glad it ended up in the way it did, because I think if the article had been published in a way that felt dishonest to what they had shared with me, that would’ve been the worst-case scenario, even if I got paid. [laughs]
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
KB: Which is why I’m still in this business and not getting paid enough. [all laugh]
FK: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s nice to sort of hear that you care about this, you know what I mean? I don’t know. Hearing about—coming into this episode and reading your article and everything makes me think about all of the…maybe the relationship that I as a fan have had to journalists writing about either my blorbos or my, you know—or fandom itself, and I hope…I don’t know. I knew some of this stuff, but it’s making me have more sympathy for journalists I don’t know, who I don’t know what they’re going through when they’re writing that article that I think is kind of bad, [KB & FK laugh] you know?
ELM: Not The New York Times, though.
FK: OK, not The New York Times.
KB: Yeah.
FK: For them, no sympathy. But you know what I’m saying, so I really appreciate you being willing to sort of talk about this—
KB: Mmm hmm.
FK: —and be open about it in those ways, because I’m sure that there are people who have not loved some of the articles that you’ve written—
KB: Hmm. What?
FK: —and that maybe some of them will—
ELM: Wow.
KB: [laughs] No, it’s true.
FK: I’m sure because it’s the internet! Kayti knows it.
KB: No, my sister will regularly read this, like, Tumblr post from 10 years ago that’s tagged as an anti-Kayti Burt post or something.
ELM: Stop! She regularly reads it?
FK: Wow.
KB: [laughing] I mean, at least every few years, like, a dramatic reading. It’s like whenever—
FK: Sisters…sisters…
ELM: [laughs] When you’re having a fight, and your sister’s like, “Let me remind you of your negative traits.” [KB & ELM laugh]
FK: That someone on the internet is anti-Kayti Burt. But anyway, I just really appreciate getting to sort of look at that and to think about it a little bit more, because the articles that I don’t like, I still don’t like them. [laughs]
KB: Mmm.
FK: But knowing the things that are shaping that—
KB: Yeah.
FK: —is helpful for me to put that in context, so thank you for that.
KB: Aww.
ELM: Well, can I ask a related and maybe a final wrapping-up question?
KB: Mmm hmm.
ELM: Flourish is just one fan. Kayti, what do you think—I mean, I have my thoughts, but you are our guest. If you could say to fans to understand the journalism they’re engaging with, what would you want them to take away? What would you want them to learn and internalize? Is it that you truly do care, and they shouldn’t assume that it’s—
KB: I mean—
ELM: There’s all these factors, right? You know?
KB: Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to speak, you know, for all entertainment journalists, because obviously [laughs] it’s a somewhat diverse group. [ELM laughs] But I do think that maybe a takeaway is, you’re not in this job for the money. [KB & ELM laugh] So you probably care at least on some level. I just feel like I’ve had to fight to stay in this job because I think it’s important, and I think it’s especially important for people who aren’t rich, straight, white, cisgender men to be covering our culture, because most of the world is not that. You know, I think it’s fine to be critical of articles you’ve read. I think you can be critical while still being kind.
FK: [laughs] Yes.
ELM: Mmm hmm.
KB: Believe it or not.
FK: No anti-Kayti Burt posts, please.
ELM: Yeah.
KB: No, I mean, it’s making my sister really happy, so… [KB & ELM laughs]
FK: Kind to your sister, just not to you.
KB: Yeah. But, yeah, I don’t know. Honestly, I still feel like—I feel like I’m kind of in the middle of, like, the storm that is happening with digital media, so it’s really unclear what’s gonna happen. I think that the reason I’m still doing this is because I care about stories, and I’m curious about people, and people who find belonging or meaning or purpose in stories and in fandoms, and I don’t know. There’s nothing else to say, I guess. I’m gonna keep trying to [laughs] make a little bit of money by asking these questions and writing about it and, yeah, you should read some of my articles, I guess.
FK: [laughs] OK, that’s the pitch.
ELM: [laughs] Yeah.
FK: Everybody should read some of your articles. Thank you.
KB: Also—
ELM: And don’t write negative Tumblr posts.
KB: No, you can, you can. That’s your right. I also wanted to say that I feel like it’s fitting that I’m a guest on this podcast near the end of this chapter, because I was actually at the panel where you guys met.
FK: Aww!
ELM: Oh yeah. [KB laughs] That’s right.
FK: It is fitting! You were.
KB: I was, like, an extra in the background. [laughs]
FK: You were! [ELM laughs] Wow.
ELM: Oh, were we the main cast of the—
KB: Yes.
FK: Yeah, obviously. [ELM laughs] I have big main-character energy. Elizabeth, I don’t know. [laughs]
ELM: That’s me, actually, so… [FK laughs]
KB: So, yeah.
FK: Well, I am grateful that you were able to come on.
KB: Me too.
FK: And, you know, thank you so much.
ELM: Yeah, I’m so glad we got to have you.
KB: Thanks for inviting me.
[Interstitial music]
FK: I feel very educated now. [ELM laughs] Thank you.
ELM: OK, wow. Just had to get in some of those facts there.
FK: Facts! No, it’s nice to hear, you know, I mean, yeah, having consumed a lot of the kind of journalism that Kayti does, it’s really interesting to get to hear her talking about that, and you talking about that, and thinking about it from an angle that obviously I know that there are people writing it, [laughs] but it’s interesting to hear from that person! You know?
ELM: Yeah, no, absolutely. It’s really interesting for me, obviously, I am friends with a lot of journalists, have worked with a lot, you know, and I’ve been on both sides. So has Kayti, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: Who’s also been an editor, in addition. And I do think some of the things she describes are not problems that face me. It’s interesting to think about the places where we diverged. Like, the idea that I could write something that would get me taken off a list. It doesn’t factor—you know what I mean?
FK: Right, right. That’s not your concern. [laughs]
ELM: Even then, I think it’s also partly because, in addition to being a reporter covering fans, I’ve been a critic for a long time, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And this is a different problem, right? Which she didn’t really get into, but this kind of idea of criticism dwindling—
FK: Right.
ELM: —because you can get, we talked about this in the “Fanfluencers” thing, right? Why would you get a critic who might say something mean, when you could get an auditorium full of MovieTokers who know that they need to just keep being positive or they’re gonna get taken off the list, right?
FK: Yeah, totally.
ELM: And I think that there’s a lot of real journalists, like Kayti—I don’t think these MovieTokers for the most part are journalists or critics, right? They’re influencers. But there’s real journalists like Kayti who are facing that similar—
FK: Right.
ELM: —question, and it’s like, you know, what if you want to say something negative about the person you’re profiling, right?
FK: Yup.
ELM: You know? And you don’t want to get labeled as difficult. I think that these questions are really hard. It’s also, I think one thing that we didn’t touch on very much too is kind of how shameless PR folks are. I mean, [laughs] I don’t want to be—you’ve worked on that so you’re nodding right now. You’re like, “Yes. I’m aware.”
FK: I’m aware, yeah, no, I worked with PR people. I was not myself a PR person, and they are very shameless.
ELM: I have, in some of my jobs in the past, been adjacent to the PR side and been kind of shocked at, like, kind of the way they talk about journalists, but it’s so easy, like—OK, for example, I wrote this big piece about Comic-Con, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And about the, you know, the strikes and everything that was going on. I got an email, there were some K-pop stars who had been at one of the parties performing, and I got an email from their publicist saying, “Do you want to change your story after the fact and mention that they were there?”
FK: Yeah!
ELM: And I was like—and I don’t feel bad saying this right now, like, publically—
FK: Right.
ELM: —because it’s like, how shameless. Like, I’m sorry—
FK: Yeah, well—
ELM: First of all—
FK: You never know if you don’t ask, Elizabeth.
ELM: Shoot your shot, man, but yeah, the idea—also, this misunderstanding, I mean, I get these kind of spammy requests all the time on LinkedIn that are, like, “Our startup is looking for a positive mention. Can you put that in WIRED magazine?” And it’s like, I don’t know what to say, you know? And it’s a little alarming to me, because obviously when the lines start to get blurry and you move into kind of influencer, paid-post territory—
FK: Right.
ELM: —that’s not happening in WIRED, but it’s certainly happening in places that may—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —have a more professional sheen than—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —they used to, so I don’t know. It’s fraught. It’s fraught.
FK: Well, you know what this is a good transition into?
ELM: What? [laughs]
FK: It’s a good transition into the fact that even though the audio portion of this podcast is in fact ending—sorry for anybody who, you know, didn’t know that. Go listen to our last episode if you didn’t. But—maybe not ending forever, but taking a hiatus, anyway, with me not part of it—
ELM: OK, I’m waiting to see how this is a good transition. It’s a long one.
FK: Elizabeth [ELM laughs] is still going to be putting out journalism about fandom through Fansplaining, and you can continue to support that work, so if you have been supporting us on Patreon, you should keep doing that, and you should consider doing it, even if you haven’t been before, because I can tell you for a fact, we are not pay-to-play, [both laugh] you know, journalisming here, and—
ELM: We do get some weird requests along these lines.
FK: No, we absolutely do. This is part of why I mentioned it, is that we’ve had many weird requests.
ELM: It’s true.
FK: So we don’t do that, so, you know—
ELM: Leaving that money on the table.
FK: Help fund people who definitely don’t do that. Patreon.com/Fansplaining. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, so as we said last time, Flourish, hitting the road. Hitting the baby road, as they say.
FK: [laughing] Hitting the road paved with baby.
ELM: Yup, and Christianity.
FK: [laughing] Baby and Jesus. This is a weird road.
ELM: Jesus—the Baby Jesus road.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: [laughs] But, yeah, so starting in June—so our last episode will be right before Memorial Day. Last bit of May. And then starting in June, we will be publishing—Fansplaining will be publishing pieces, hopefully at least one a month, depending on whether we get the same amount of sustained Patreon support as now or as you said, we could get more. [FK laughs] I’m quite hopeful that with the amount of time that I’m gonna have not editing two episodes a month—
FK: [laughing] Yeah, you’re gonna really have a lot of time on your hands.
ELM: I mean, it’s not that much time, but [laughs] I will have enough time to edit one article a month right now—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —in that length of time. I’ve already started to hear from some journalists, because I put some feelers out and, you know, said we were taking pitches. This is kind of a blanket call to say if you are a journalist and you have seen the kind of coverage that we’ve had in the past or know the kind of ways we tackle topics, even on the podcast, and have a pitch, we’d love to hear it. I’m saying “we,” but it’s really me.
FK: Yeah, it’s not me. I’m not going to be hearing these pitches. You might mention them to me, and I’ll be like, “Sounds cool.” [laughs]
ELM: Yes. Maybe I’ll pay you as my copyeditor.
FK: That is not a job that I would be good at. [ELM laughs] And you know that. [laughs]
ELM: You’re right, I should probably get someone else.
FK: I am not a detail-oriented person, on 99% of the time.
ELM: All right, I wasn’t gonna be too harsh, but you’re kind of right.
FK: I know my strengths and my weaknesses, and I can be detail oriented, but only when I get a fluke in my head about it, and that is not often.
ELM: No, like, when you get a—you kind of—something catches your eye—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —when you’re beta-ing for me, and you’re like, you can only focus on that, and you’re like—
FK: That’s true. That happens.
ELM: “Wow, there’s a lot of adverbs in here.” And it’s like, “Could you read the whole sentence? You’re just looking for ‘ly’ right now.” It’s like you turn into a find-replace about one thing.
FK: Yeah, sometimes I do that.
ELM: But overall, you’re a great beta.
FK: Thank you, because I have—because I’m a good beta on the big-picture stuff, which is the kind of person that I am.
ELM: No, actually, here’s your greatest strength as a beta. You’re extremely good at thinking of the characters—I love how we’re just gonna say this on the air. [FK laughs] I’m gonna say it right—you’re [laughs] extremely good at thinking of the characters as, like, real people—
FK: Oh!
ELM: —and trying to figure out—you are!
FK: That’s so nice!
ELM: And trying to figure out their—the emotional beats and the motivations, right? So you’re like—
FK: Oh, that’s great to hear.
ELM: So you’re like, “I don’t understand why you—” It’s so helpful! Right? Because it’s like, sometimes you’re like, “Oh, I hadn’t even thought through the real consequences of why, you know, if these two did this, then would that happen?” And that kind of thing, right? Yeah, it’s really good. I’ve never told you this before?
FK: No, you haven’t. That makes me feel great. It also does not translate into editing journalism, [ELM laughs] I don't think. So with that, we’ll just say, it’s for the best that I’m not gonna be involved in this part of the project too much, and you should support us on Patreon, and also spread the word to people that even, you know, if they hear the podcast ending and they think it’s gonna, you know, nothing’s happening, tell them! The audio portion may be gone for a while, but there will still be Fansplaining content out in the world.
ELM: It’s true. Also, there’s three more episodes with you, regular ones, and there’s at least one special episode on House, M.D.
FK: That’s right.
ELM: I just watched—devastating all over again—the finale with the bus. [FK sighs deeply] You remember—
FK: Devastating.
ELM: —the second I saw that bus, I was like, “Oh shit.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: “I had forgotten about this.”
FK: Yup. It was a great episode.
ELM: Especially the first part.
FK: Yup.
ELM: So, so good.
FK: Yup.
ELM: And it made me cry.
FK: Yeah, House can do that.
ELM: So we will be talking about House at length. We will use more descriptors. We are gonna assume that you’ve seen House when we talk about it, I think, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: At some point in April, that’ll be coming out. So get that, for patrons, at $3 a month and up, and as a reminder, we have a huge range of other special episodes, like almost a dozen “Tropefests.” We talked about all sorts of stuff. Schitt’s Creek.
FK: Yeah, absolutely.
ELM: Was just thinking about that show the other day.
FK: Yeah, I was thinking about rewatching it, actually, and—
ELM: Yeah, it’s a nice, fun watch.
FK: Yeah, it’s a fun watch. And also, I believe we have one more mailbox episode, is that right?
ELM: Right. So our next episode, just to give a little peek behind the curtain, our next episode is going to be with an expert on self-inserts, which is something—
FK: Agh!
ELM: —it’s one of those topics that we’ve been literally saying since 2015, we’re like—
FK: So excited that we’re going to do it, finally.
ELM: [laughs] It’s like, “We gotta find someone who’s actually working on this!” And we have now, so, an academic who’s working on this. And then we are going to have our final AMA with Flourish, and so if you have any questions, and as a reminder, we said last time, it would be great to not have, like, a—we’re gonna do a bit of a retrospective in the final episode, so we’re not necessarily soliciting, “Flourish, what have you learned in the last nine years?”
FK: Right. We’re soliciting—
ELM: Or, like, “What have you…” you know—
FK: “I have a question that I would like to hear Flourish’s opinion on before Flourish goes away into the wild blue yonder.
ELM: Not even Flourish’s opinion. Just imagine it’s a normal AMA and you want just the normal Fansplaining takes.
FK: Yeah, well, I’m just saying, you know, they can have your takes later.
ELM: The Flourish opinion. “Flourish, what do you think? I’m trying to read all Star Trek novels. What platform should I use to log my efforts?”
FK: Oh, I have so many opinions about that. [laughs]
ELM: What if—here, maybe as a special treat, I’ll write a few Flourish-specific questions—
FK: Oh man.
ELM: —that are hyperspecific to Flourish.
FK: I would love that. Please do it. OK, [ELM laughs] you can contact us to give us those questions, fansplaining at gmail.com. You can use our ask box on Tumblr, which is fansplaining.tumblr.com, it’s open, anon is on. There is a form on our website. You can also call 1-401-526-FANS, and give me the treat of listening to your beautiful voice, which is something I really love, actually, so please do that. Yeah.
ELM: Yeah?
FK: That’s it!
ELM: All right. Well, now you know about journalism, and now you have a lot of sympathy for me, Kayti, and everyone else in the profession.
FK: I do. Yup. And I’ll talk to you later, Elizabeth.
ELM: All right, bye, Flourish!
FK: [laughs] Bye!
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