A good place for Bad Subjects: Long-running web publication a home for progressive topics

November 17, 2005 by

Non-profit and volunteer-run, the website Bad Subjects is an open forum and news source for left-leaning thought.

Bad Subjects urges its readers to see the politics in everyday situations through editorials, reviews, news and blogs.

The site presents arguments and conversation starters that are “too clear and polemical to pass muster in either the academic world or the mainstream progressive press,” according to founding member Charlie Bertsch, an associate professor of English at The University of Arizona.

The idea to form Bad Subjects stemmed from a discussion group called “Politics Collective” at the University of California at Berkeley, Bertsch said.

Initially a small campus magazine, Bad Subjects went cyber on a gopher server at Berkeley before web servers even existed, according to co-editor Jonathan Sterne, an associate professor of art history and communication studies at McGill University.

Bad Subjects “predates all of the news/blog sites in existence” and is the second longest continuously running publication on the Internet, Sterne said. Bertsch added that Bad Subjects “was one of the only progressive publications listed in Yahoo’s first indices of web content.”

Even through the transition from print to online, Bad Subjects has always acted as a bridge between the academy and people “working nine-to-five jobs … [who don’t] have the time or inclination to read scholarly books or journals” but are having similar ideas regarding current politics, according to Bertsch.

The production team of Bad Subjects is collectively run by numerous editors in different locations, ranging from Berkeley to Arizona. The editors form groups to gather articles and topics for each issue, communicating mostly by e-mail. The staff ranges from graduate students to people with professorships.

Sterne described mainstream journalism as an arena where “expediency, chronic understaffing, dependency on PR hacks as ‘official sources,’ obsession with news cycles and concern with profit motive consistently undermine the real social purpose of news media, which is to foster critical thought and democratic debate.”

“Journalism students should look to Bad Subjects … as [a] serious alternative to the over-professionalized world of mainstream journalism,” Sterne said.

According to the site, Bad Subjects gets about 1.4 million hits per month and has more than 120,000 readers worldwide, as the free print magazine and site are translated into English, Spanish and French.

Filed Under: Sites

Meta-grad: USC alum serves up Metascores to entertainment lovers

September 30, 2005 by

Metacritic.com, with its unique scoring system, offers consumers compilations of reviews for films, DVDs, music, games and books, all on one comprehensible website.

Co-founders and editors Marc Doyle, Julie Roberts and Jason Dietz aggregate reviews from critics as well-known as Roger Ebert to provide a thorough look into the entertainment industry’s latest. With different sections for each genre, readers can read full-length reviews from critics or simply glance at the item’s “Metascore.”

A Metascore is a score of 1-100 averaged from the critics’ ratings. Readers can view ratings of individual critics that have been converted to the 1-100 scale or the cumulative Metascore averaged from all of the critics’ ratings and reviews. Reading an item’s rating is simple — the higher the Metascore, the better the reviews the listing has received.

Metascores were formerly posted as single digit ratings, but the editors, with the help of renowned critic Roger Ebert, converted them to the 1-100 system they currently use to give their readers more specific ratings. According to Doyle, Roger Ebert told Metacritic that the single digit ratings were too imprecise and that the 1-100 system would require less rounding when averaging the Metascore. The change went into effect about three years ago.

CNET spokesperson Martha Papalia said staff members at Metacritic.com “enjoy a regular dialogue with the critics, who do not hesitate to contact them when they think an individual score that is assigned to their reviews should be adjusted.”

The main goal of the site is “to educate people on the best way to use their entertainment dollar,” Doyle explained.

Over 120 critics’ reviews from publications like The New York Times and Rolling Stone are quoted on Metacritic. Doyle says that one main objective of the site is to provide the public only with critics that are reliable and can be taken seriously. The Metacritic staff takes the prestige of a critic’s publication, the critic’s caliber of writing, and the critic’s reputation (gathered by talking to other people in the industry) into consideration before posting their reviews on the site.

After its launch in January 2001, Metacritic began generating revenue with advertising, licensing its reviews to companies like AOL and other Internet providers and through affiliates like Amazon.com. The site gets about 210,000 page views a day — 42,000 of which are registered users, according to Doyle.

These numbers could grow given that Metacritic was recently acquired by CNET Networks. Already changes to the site are underway, with a soon-to-be-launched TV review section in the works, according to Doyle.

Doyle, a graduate of USC’s law school, is slated to be featured in the November issue of the USC Trojan Family Magazine.

Filed Under: People