A new endeavor from Entertainment Weekly gives fans a voice in
critiquing TV
By: Jessica Torrez-Riley
“I always like talking about television, but at home no one takes it seriously,” Rogers said. “And even at a school where there’s such a focus on media and art, TV often gets treated as the bastard child of film.”Amy Rogers may be majoring in television production, but she has found that discussing her favorite TV shows is seen as taboo by many of her artsy classmates at Emerson College.
But, TVFan, a new online endeavor launched by Entertainment Weekly magazine in February, has given Rogers a way to share her opinions about all things TV.
“When EW created TVFan, I just felt like I had a legitimate outlet for all the ranting and raving I do anyway, but somewhere that people will actually listen and care for a change,” said Rogers, who writes and comments on TVFan’s message boards under the alias “The Counteragent.”
Fueled by the networks’ decisions to stream more video content online through their own Web sites and enterprises like Hulu.com, TVFan is the latest in an increasing trend of professional media outlets trying to tap into audiences’ desire to participate in the conversation about television. According to recent research into online fan communities this trend is allowing television networks to use audience feedback in new ways that may be reshaping the industry.
“What people are doing online is what they used to do when discussing television with their coworkers,” said Joshua Green, a post-doctoral researcher from the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT.
“Talking online makes (the conversations) a little more tangible. Temporality and distance are overcome by going online and there is a degree of anonymity that is useful.”Joshua Green (Left), the research manager at MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium, studies the “changing understandings of what television 'is', the formation of the participatory audience, and television branding in the context of participatory culture,” according to the Consortium’s Web site.
Becoming an ‘online water-cooler’
TVFan allows readers of EW.com to write
their own television recaps and blogs, join fan groups for specific shows, and compete against other users in pop culture “throwdowns.”
Entertainment Weekly hired Sports Technologies, Inc., a Connecticut-based company that creates social, interactive Web sites and is best known for the sports aggregation site FanNation.com to create the TVFan Web site.
“We were looking to get into social community and user-generated content type world,” said Dan Jepperson, one of TVFan’s creators and moderators. “This is one (site) that we are really excited about and really hope that the audience continues to evolve and build up and produce better and better content.”
Jepperson said the streaming of full television episodes online by the major networks has helped lead to the creation of online communities like TVFan and Television Without Pity, a popular Web site known for its snarky analysis of TV shows that was recently bought by the cable station Bravo.
“As more television content is online we think it is really beneficial for us to be a sort of online water-cooler,” he said.
“It’s not only the placement of programming online but also engaging the audience,” he said. “(If networks) are producing television programs that people are talking about and they allow people to talk on an official Web site … it creates an immediate feedback loop. It’s a different kind of feedback than the traditional ratings system, and allows them to collect data about what people do and do not like about shows.”
Rogers said she finds that the Internet allows people to watch television the way she thinks it should be watched, “analytically and conversationally.” “Also, now that writers are eventually going to get paid for it and I no longer have to feel guilty, it’s very convenient for me to be able to watch streaming episodes online,” she said. “I often have schedule conflicts with my shows, whether it be writers’ meetings for a soap opera I work on or just ‘Top Chef’ and ‘Men in Trees’ being on at the same time.”
Entertainment Weekly hired Sports Technologies, Inc., a Connecticut-based company that creates social, interactive Web sites and is best known for the sports aggregation site FanNation.com to create the TVFan Web site.
“We were looking to get into social community and user-generated content type world,” said Dan Jepperson, one of TVFan’s creators and moderators. “This is one (site) that we are really excited about and really hope that the audience continues to evolve and build up and produce better and better content.”
Jepperson said the streaming of full television episodes online by the major networks has helped lead to the creation of online communities like TVFan and Television Without Pity, a popular Web site known for its snarky analysis of TV shows that was recently bought by the cable station Bravo.
“As more television content is online we think it is really beneficial for us to be a sort of online water-cooler,” he said.
Listen to some of the people interviewed in this story above.
Green, who is also the research manager on MIT’s Convergence Culture
Consortium team, said that fan Web sites paired with online video streaming is a “symbiotic” relationship that has the potential to increase the number of viewers for some TV shows.“It’s not only the placement of programming online but also engaging the audience,” he said. “(If networks) are producing television programs that people are talking about and they allow people to talk on an official Web site … it creates an immediate feedback loop. It’s a different kind of feedback than the traditional ratings system, and allows them to collect data about what people do and do not like about shows.”
Rogers said she finds that the Internet allows people to watch television the way she thinks it should be watched, “analytically and conversationally.” “Also, now that writers are eventually going to get paid for it and I no longer have to feel guilty, it’s very convenient for me to be able to watch streaming episodes online,” she said. “I often have schedule conflicts with my shows, whether it be writers’ meetings for a soap opera I work on or just ‘Top Chef’ and ‘Men in Trees’ being on at the same time.”
Web sites like Hulu.com, an online video service founded by NBC Universal and News Corp. that went public in March, are allowing for
more instantaneous reactions from viewers, according to Green.
Christina Lee, a Hulu spokeswoman, said the site traffic in the first two weeks since going public has exceeded early expectations.
Viewers on Hulu are able to rate and review shows, which Lee said allows for the creation of a “community environment” and this is enhanced by the ability for bloggers to embed videos directly from Hulu into personal blogs or social networking sites, she said.
“We believe that users will always want the flexibility of consuming media in a variety of environments,” Lee said. “As our mission states, we want to give people great programming when, where and how they want it, so we believe that a free, streaming service is the first step in achieving this mission.”
Green said he thinks this ability to embed and quote video clips is providing “new tools to allow us to talk about programs.”
“When viewers are able to actually show people the clip the discussion is enriched,” he said. “What’s most important about this is that television viewing is done away from the television. People can discuss and watch all in the same space, and it changes the immediacy of the discussion.”
A site by fans for fans
Dan Jepperson, known as “shaggydan” to users of TVFan, said the thought behind the Web site stems from a desire to tap into a community of passionate fans.
“(When you) take some sort of dive into this community Web site idea, it often helps to have a field or some sort of thing like television or movies or music or sports that people are really compelled to talk about,” he said. “Television we all identified as something that people are really into. There are a lot of people that have a really deep knowledge … and are interested in talking about their favorite shows and writing blogs and recaps and sort of filling this role of an amateur critic of television.”
The user-created content on TVFan is featured alongside EW.com’s professional critics and even appears on the front page of the main Web site.
“It adds a level of excitement (for the users) that you can go and you can write something and have it be recognized along with the big boys and have it be something that stands side by side with an editor or a writer from Entertainment Weekly,” Jepperson said. “I think that’s something that a lot of users find really cool and really compelling. It definitely provokes people to put their best face forward so that it has a chance to get recognized.”
The content written by users can also help the professionals get an idea of the opinion of the crowd, Jepperson said.
Robert Daniels, of Dallas, a frequent contributor to TVFan sees an added value in having the professional articles alongside the amateur writings.
“You get the professional critique-y observations and then you can get observations from a fan-base or more social point of view of the show,” Daniels said. “Sometimes these critics can be kind of snobby, so it’s nice to read something from someone who’s down to earth, just a regular person. There’s definitely an advantage to both sides.”
Daniels, who writes under the alias “Rob Grizzly,” was recently spotlighted on the Web site for his “vast knowledge of television and movies.” Although, some may be surprised to know that “Grizzly” is a recent film school graduate from Southern Methodist University and had never previously blogged before discovering TVFan.
“I’ve always had something to say, but I’ve never felt like anything I said was worth saying,” Daniels said. “I’m not very computer savvy or anything like that, so I just didn’t blog a lot. But getting on Entertainment Weekly, it’s a lot of fun, so I guess I’m becoming a blogger.”
Daniels has even gone on to share his opinions on television and movies on other entertainment sites. He said he just enjoys getting his “voice out there.”
His experience writing for TVFan has made watching television less like a hobby and more like a job, Daniels said.
After getting some positive feedback on his recap of “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles,” a new Fox series, Daniels felt a need to keep writing about the show.
“Even sometimes when the show isn’t even all that good I find myself sort of trudging through it just for the sake of being able to post on the blog,” Daniels said. “It’s sort of fun to have a continuity with something … I guess I really find myself somewhat obligated to keep blogging on a particular show.”
Getting paid to recap
Through Web sites like Television Without Pity (TWoP), writing about TV can actually become a paying job for television fans.
In early 2000, Jon Bourgault of Washington, D.C., was interested in a show called “Popular,” but nobody he knew from work or home was watching it.
“So as one does when they need to find out something, I turned to the Internet and found Television Without Pity,” Bourgault said. “The thing I love about the Web site is that whatever the show is … it’s just great to have a group of people who care about those odd little things as much as you do.”
For four years, Bourgault posted comments in the Television Without Pity forums, until the moderators approached him about writing recaps for the site. After a trial run on a made-for-TV movie, Bourgault discovered he enjoyed the process and began covering “The West Wing.”
Now, under the alias “LGT,” he is writing about one of the most popular shows on the site “Lost.”
“Freelance writers have contracts with the site … and some of the people who recap are full-time writers and this is part of how they support themselves,” Bourgault said. “For me I have a kind of real job as a lawyer, so it’s more of a hobby and a creative outlet for me.”
Bourgault said he has been working for Television Without Pity since before it was bought by Bravo, but he hasn’t seen much change behind the scenes.
“As you can tell … we cover a lot more shows now and we also have been experimenting with different kinds of formats,” he said. “A lot of little things, but the writing I do for Lost is no different than the recapping I did before. It’s the same product, it’s the same process.”
Daniel MacEachern is the city editor for the Fort McMurray Today in Alberta as well as a staff writer for Television Without Pity. He has written for the site since it was founded eight years ago, when it was called “Mighty Big TV.”
“NBC bought the site and now we get paid a lot better than we used to in the early days,” MacEachern said. “But the reason that we do it is that we know that people read the site and appreciate what we do. It used to be so much work in the old days for so little money that I don’t think anyone would have been doing it if it wasn’t fun.”
MacEachern said he earns $250 for each recap that he writes, and lesser amounts are paid for the two-paragraph “weecaps” and the medium length articles for sitcoms called “recaplets.” Some writers can earn additional money by moderating the forums and other aspects of Television Without Pity that relate to the shows they cover.
Jacob Clifton, of Austin, has been writing about “American Idol” since 2004 and considers his job to three things: “humorist/critic, storyteller, and couch buddy.”
Clifton, who works primarily as a freelance writer for MSNBC and Radar magazine, attributes his success at writing to what he calls “TWoP boot camp.”
“It was my first writing job, in some ways my first job period, and that has been, and continues to be, an exhilarating learning curve,” he said. “It's a serious writing lab with a vicious turnaround cycle. Depending on the show and format of the coverage, you've got either 12 hours or five days to put something together, and once it's up, it's up.”
Clifton said he has tried in the past to balance a regular office job with writing for the site, but found the schedule to be brutal.
“Like this month, I have three shows going, so I'm working like every night, and dealing with the forums ... it's close to six hours a day, three or four days a week, between writing and (moderating),” he said. “I've worked myself to death with that schedule, basically, in the past. So supplementing just TWoP with freelancing is a mental health move.”
Looking ahead
Despite being just over a month old, the minds behind TVFan are looking forward to seeing what the site can become in the future.
“The beautiful thing about something like TVFan is you can grow at the speed of the users,” Jepperson said. “What the users are looking for and what the users are responding to I think is where we can put our focus on in the future. It’s a very collaborative environment that way.”
Currently the TVFan site has no external advertising, but Jepperson said this is one area that they hope to change.
“The big thing we wanted to accomplish was having
successful traffic going back and forth between … EW.com to TVFan.EW.com, and set up that circular nature,” he said. “On the whole it adds a lot of value to advertisers, because they aren’t just advertising on a smaller Web site like TVFan because there is a lot of association with a bigger brand like Entertainment Weekly.”
MacEachern said besides the profitability and success of these fan-driven Web sites, the communities are having the long-term effect of demanding higher quality TV programming.
“I certainly think Web sites like ours encourage better television and that there’s more of a sense the people need their entertainment to be good and not necessarily just escapist. There need to be television shows that have plots that don’t disappear from week to week,” he said. “People realize that there’s a huge appetite for quality television as evidence by the popularity by not just our Web sites but lots of Web sites that are out there; I think that they just encourage better television and the realization that there are smart television viewers out there.”
While the experts are unsure of exactly how much impact the online “chatter” is having on the industry, some still see a larger value in having fans share their opinions.
Amy Rogers, who aspires to enter the television industry one day as a screenwriter, said she finds reading and writing content on fan Web sites useful for learning what an audience needs.
“I do enjoy other people’s recaps and blogs in the interest of getting other perspectives than my own,” she said. “After all, when someday I'm creating television that airs somewhere outside of the Emerson Channel, I need it to appeal to people other than myself.”
“(When you) take some sort of dive into this community Web site idea, it often helps to have a field or some sort of thing like television or movies or music or sports that people are really compelled to talk about,” he said. “Television we all identified as something that people are really into. There are a lot of people that have a really deep knowledge … and are interested in talking about their favorite shows and writing blogs and recaps and sort of filling this role of an amateur critic of television.”
The user-created content on TVFan is featured alongside EW.com’s professional critics and even appears on the front page of the main Web site.
“It adds a level of excitement (for the users) that you can go and you can write something and have it be recognized along with the big boys and have it be something that stands side by side with an editor or a writer from Entertainment Weekly,” Jepperson said. “I think that’s something that a lot of users find really cool and really compelling. It definitely provokes people to put their best face forward so that it has a chance to get recognized.”
The content written by users can also help the professionals get an idea of the opinion of the crowd, Jepperson said.
Robert Daniels, of Dallas, a frequent contributor to TVFan sees an added value in having the professional articles alongside the amateur writings.
“You get the professional critique-y observations and then you can get observations from a fan-base or more social point of view of the show,” Daniels said. “Sometimes these critics can be kind of snobby, so it’s nice to read something from someone who’s down to earth, just a regular person. There’s definitely an advantage to both sides.”
Daniels, who writes under the alias “Rob Grizzly,” was recently spotlighted on the Web site for his “vast knowledge of television and movies.” Although, some may be surprised to know that “Grizzly” is a recent film school graduate from Southern Methodist University and had never previously blogged before discovering TVFan.
“I’ve always had something to say, but I’ve never felt like anything I said was worth saying,” Daniels said. “I’m not very computer savvy or anything like that, so I just didn’t blog a lot. But getting on Entertainment Weekly, it’s a lot of fun, so I guess I’m becoming a blogger.”
Daniels has even gone on to share his opinions on television and movies on other entertainment sites. He said he just enjoys getting his “voice out there.”
His experience writing for TVFan has made watching television less like a hobby and more like a job, Daniels said.
After getting some positive feedback on his recap of “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles,” a new Fox series, Daniels felt a need to keep writing about the show.
“Even sometimes when the show isn’t even all that good I find myself sort of trudging through it just for the sake of being able to post on the blog,” Daniels said. “It’s sort of fun to have a continuity with something … I guess I really find myself somewhat obligated to keep blogging on a particular show.”
Getting paid to recap
Through Web sites like Television Without Pity (TWoP), writing about TV can actually become a paying job for television fans.
In early 2000, Jon Bourgault of Washington, D.C., was interested in a show called “Popular,” but nobody he knew from work or home was watching it.
“So as one does when they need to find out something, I turned to the Internet and found Television Without Pity,” Bourgault said. “The thing I love about the Web site is that whatever the show is … it’s just great to have a group of people who care about those odd little things as much as you do.”
For four years, Bourgault posted comments in the Television Without Pity forums, until the moderators approached him about writing recaps for the site. After a trial run on a made-for-TV movie, Bourgault discovered he enjoyed the process and began covering “The West Wing.”
Now, under the alias “LGT,” he is writing about one of the most popular shows on the site “Lost.”
“Freelance writers have contracts with the site … and some of the people who recap are full-time writers and this is part of how they support themselves,” Bourgault said. “For me I have a kind of real job as a lawyer, so it’s more of a hobby and a creative outlet for me.”
Bourgault said he has been working for Television Without Pity since before it was bought by Bravo, but he hasn’t seen much change behind the scenes.
“As you can tell … we cover a lot more shows now and we also have been experimenting with different kinds of formats,” he said. “A lot of little things, but the writing I do for Lost is no different than the recapping I did before. It’s the same product, it’s the same process.”
Daniel MacEachern is the city editor for the Fort McMurray Today in Alberta as well as a staff writer for Television Without Pity. He has written for the site since it was founded eight years ago, when it was called “Mighty Big TV.”
“NBC bought the site and now we get paid a lot better than we used to in the early days,” MacEachern said. “But the reason that we do it is that we know that people read the site and appreciate what we do. It used to be so much work in the old days for so little money that I don’t think anyone would have been doing it if it wasn’t fun.”
MacEachern said he earns $250 for each recap that he writes, and lesser amounts are paid for the two-paragraph “weecaps” and the medium length articles for sitcoms called “recaplets.” Some writers can earn additional money by moderating the forums and other aspects of Television Without Pity that relate to the shows they cover.
Jacob Clifton, of Austin, has been writing about “American Idol” since 2004 and considers his job to three things: “humorist/critic, storyteller, and couch buddy.”
Clifton, who works primarily as a freelance writer for MSNBC and Radar magazine, attributes his success at writing to what he calls “TWoP boot camp.”
“It was my first writing job, in some ways my first job period, and that has been, and continues to be, an exhilarating learning curve,” he said. “It's a serious writing lab with a vicious turnaround cycle. Depending on the show and format of the coverage, you've got either 12 hours or five days to put something together, and once it's up, it's up.”
Clifton said he has tried in the past to balance a regular office job with writing for the site, but found the schedule to be brutal.
“Like this month, I have three shows going, so I'm working like every night, and dealing with the forums ... it's close to six hours a day, three or four days a week, between writing and (moderating),” he said. “I've worked myself to death with that schedule, basically, in the past. So supplementing just TWoP with freelancing is a mental health move.”
Looking ahead
Despite being just over a month old, the minds behind TVFan are looking forward to seeing what the site can become in the future.
“The beautiful thing about something like TVFan is you can grow at the speed of the users,” Jepperson said. “What the users are looking for and what the users are responding to I think is where we can put our focus on in the future. It’s a very collaborative environment that way.”
Currently the TVFan site has no external advertising, but Jepperson said this is one area that they hope to change.
“The big thing we wanted to accomplish was having
successful traffic going back and forth between … EW.com to TVFan.EW.com, and set up that circular nature,” he said. “On the whole it adds a lot of value to advertisers, because they aren’t just advertising on a smaller Web site like TVFan because there is a lot of association with a bigger brand like Entertainment Weekly.”
MacEachern said besides the profitability and success of these fan-driven Web sites, the communities are having the long-term effect of demanding higher quality TV programming.
“I certainly think Web sites like ours encourage better television and that there’s more of a sense the people need their entertainment to be good and not necessarily just escapist. There need to be television shows that have plots that don’t disappear from week to week,” he said. “People realize that there’s a huge appetite for quality television as evidence by the popularity by not just our Web sites but lots of Web sites that are out there; I think that they just encourage better television and the realization that there are smart television viewers out there.”
While the experts are unsure of exactly how much impact the online “chatter” is having on the industry, some still see a larger value in having fans share their opinions.
Amy Rogers, who aspires to enter the television industry one day as a screenwriter, said she finds reading and writing content on fan Web sites useful for learning what an audience needs.
“I do enjoy other people’s recaps and blogs in the interest of getting other perspectives than my own,” she said. “After all, when someday I'm creating television that airs somewhere outside of the Emerson Channel, I need it to appeal to people other than myself.”
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