I’d like to take a sec to let you know that there are one or two fuckers in this fandom who don’t seem to realize that Strange Horizons is a major genre magazine that’s been around for 26 years, publishes film/tv/book reviews in addition to fiction and poetry, and has also won major awards over the years like the Hugo, Ignyte, World Fantasy, etc. TL;DR one or two losers are trying to cope by discrediting the fine publication you work for.
Anon, this is hilarious. I can only begin to guess what you witnessed or what was happening there. Whoever they are, I assume that maybe they were trying to argue that it's not a reputable enough magazine (which is such a wild claim, as you point out; it's widely read in the genre and literary world, for several decades now), and therefore I'm lying about having screener access? Whatever the situation may be, all of the options that I can imagine are funny. Although, I should note, here's the part that's kind of frustrating at times when it comes to reviews at SH: we publish on such a rolling backlog that even though our staff reviewers do get advance screening access to films and TV, sometimes the reviews don't get published until the middle or end of a show's run. That's what ultimately happened with both our review of IWTV S2 and our review of Talamasca; both were completed in advance of the seasons ending, but the gap between completion/web-galleying and publication ran quite a number of weeks because we try our best to have a healthy number of weekly issues set up in advance at any given time (not only is SH unique because it was founded as an online-only publication as far back as 2000, but because it publishes weekly instead of monthly, and has always done so). When you're not a first-tier news/entertainment publication? Urgency isn't the game, so I can understand how, looking in from outside, the publication dates on our reviews don't have the same appearance of immediacy as reviews at major news outlets. I'm starting to see the ludicrous angle that these parties might be trying to use to discredit me, actually. At a literary/culture magazine, which is what we are, if you have a heavily reading-focused audience that's mostly concerned with print matter (digital or physical), delayed publication of a TV review means you're catering more to the viewers who weren't as keen to start watching right when it started releasing. That's an audience that's as worthy of reach as any other. We're a genre magazine that publishes artwork, fiction, poetry, and reviews, and it doesn't diminish our credentials as editors and writers in the eyes of TV networks and film production companies: they are just as happy to give us screeners as any other journalists. If someone's calling me dishonest, then all that shows on their part is a lack of awareness regarding different types of publications and their intricacies. We've won accolades for the editorial and publishing work that we do, and the short stories and poems that we publish frequently go on to win major awards and launch writers' careers. Anyway, shout-out to my hard-working, award-winning colleagues at SH. And if you're interested in discovering a SF/F/Spec magazine that's been around for almost 30 years that publishes a wide array of content, it's very worth a read.
turnnoffyourmind
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