![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cdybedahlOn my B7 mailing list, there occasionally crops up a debate on paper fanzines versus online story collections. On one side there are (primarily) the people who have been fans for a long time, since long before the Internet became common among ordinary people. On the other side are the people who barely remember a time before the Web. For Group A, their first and primary fandom contact tends to have been paper 'zines. For the second, it tends to have been (and be) the net.
Disregarding almost all of the usual arguments, there is one thing that Group A claims that I agree with: on the average, the quality of the stories in a zine is much higher than in a story archive on the web. In the zine, someone chose the story, edited it and then had it printed. In a web archive, the archivist for the most part barely has the time to have a look at the layout. You can easily find stories on the web that are full of horrible spelling and atrocious grammar, and while beta-reading is nice and usually helps a lot it's not quite the same thing as proper editing.
Since I don't particularly like paper zines (they cost too much, I have to order them blind and it takes far, far too long for them to arrive), I would like to bring the advantages of the zines to the web. Many have tried to do that. None, that I know of, have succeeded. That is, I suspect, because they have all depended on a handful of people to do a lot of work in a short period of time. In anything but the shortest run, that's not going to work. So what's needed is a way to trick a lot of people into doing some work each.
The obvious way (to me, at least) to try to do that is a "matchmaker" website. A place where you could go not only to read stories, but also to upload your own writings for editing or to edit the stories of others. The site itself wouldn't do much more than to store the stories, present them to readers (allowing them so select on different criteria, of course), present them as available for editing, and mediate contact between the writer and a volunteer editor. Once pleased with the story, the editor would be able to put a "stamp of approval" on the story. So, in theory, you would be able to ask the site to show you stories approved by an editor you like and get a bunch of stories that you are almost sure to enjoy. Not to mention that people who don't write could contribute to fandom anyway, and that writers could learn to write better.
But. All this is just a pipe dream unless more people than I think that it sounds like a good idea. Ergo, a question:
[Poll #93786]
Disregarding almost all of the usual arguments, there is one thing that Group A claims that I agree with: on the average, the quality of the stories in a zine is much higher than in a story archive on the web. In the zine, someone chose the story, edited it and then had it printed. In a web archive, the archivist for the most part barely has the time to have a look at the layout. You can easily find stories on the web that are full of horrible spelling and atrocious grammar, and while beta-reading is nice and usually helps a lot it's not quite the same thing as proper editing.
Since I don't particularly like paper zines (they cost too much, I have to order them blind and it takes far, far too long for them to arrive), I would like to bring the advantages of the zines to the web. Many have tried to do that. None, that I know of, have succeeded. That is, I suspect, because they have all depended on a handful of people to do a lot of work in a short period of time. In anything but the shortest run, that's not going to work. So what's needed is a way to trick a lot of people into doing some work each.
The obvious way (to me, at least) to try to do that is a "matchmaker" website. A place where you could go not only to read stories, but also to upload your own writings for editing or to edit the stories of others. The site itself wouldn't do much more than to store the stories, present them to readers (allowing them so select on different criteria, of course), present them as available for editing, and mediate contact between the writer and a volunteer editor. Once pleased with the story, the editor would be able to put a "stamp of approval" on the story. So, in theory, you would be able to ask the site to show you stories approved by an editor you like and get a bunch of stories that you are almost sure to enjoy. Not to mention that people who don't write could contribute to fandom anyway, and that writers could learn to write better.
But. All this is just a pipe dream unless more people than I think that it sounds like a good idea. Ergo, a question:
[Poll #93786]
