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Guys, I'm biting the hell out of my tongue right now.
As I sit here looking over the columns that almost always make it into the Scoop, the Horoscopes, the recipes, the Base Spotlight, the Behind the Mask, the Artist Spotlight... There's one that's painfully missing yet again: Belle's City Traveler column.
I am responsible for proofreading, editing, taking pictures for, formatting, and submitting the City Traveler column. On the surface, it looks like I've been doing a really crappy job. Belle's article has only been published in four of the last nine weeks, less than a 50% of the time. This is much more than an "oops, simple mistake." People have actually approached Belle and asked her when her next column will be published and where her column was in weeks past, and it's downright embarrassing.
For the record, I have not been laying down on the job. Here's a brief rundown on what has happened in the past nine weeks:
<ul type="square">[*]On October 26, the article ran, albeit with a misspelled title that was thankfully corrected.[*]On November 2, everything ran okay.[*]On November 9, even though I submitted the column on time, it just plain didn't run. When I asked about it, I was told, "it may have been overlooked."[*]On November 16, the column that was supposed to run on November 9 finally ran.[*]On November 23, there wasn't supposed to be an issue published according to a note in the previous issue. Because of that, I didn't submit the column that I had planned for that issue. To my surprise, an issue did in fact run on November 23, sans City Traveler, of course.[*]On November 30, there wasn't an issue published at all. I was told, "We'll run it next week."[*]On December 7, City Traveler was
yet again not published for the third straight week. I wasn't really given an explanation why, I guess it was just overlooked again.[*]On December 14, the column that was written for November 23 was
finally published. The significance of this is that the column was supposed to be timed to coincide with the anniversary of the
Faultline renovation (November 28), but because of these repeated mistakes, the anniversary was missed by over two weeks.[*]I submitted the column for this week (December 21) around midnight Eastern on Wednesday. (Having been a former staff member of the City Scoop, I know this is by deadline, and I have personally witnessed many articles submitted after that deadline still make it in.) At noon the next day, I was told, "this will have to go into the next issue."[/list]In short, if you're wondering where Belle's column is this week, it's in the hands of the Scoop staff, as all of her others been (or would have been, in the case of the Thanksgiving "surprise" issue), on time.
I think it's a good, well-written column that deserves a chance to be read, and Belle has gotten some great comments about it, for which she is
very appreciative. She desperately tries her best to make Paragon City a fun and interesting place to be, and I've gone through extraordinary efforts to make sure that the City Traveler column is in before deadline and in a format that is extremely easy to publish.
I'm trying to decide what to do. On the one hand, I want to continue supporting the community, and especially Lighthouse and Ex Libris, who have invested a lot into the City Scoop project and who I have immense respect for as community representatives. On the other, I'm extremely tired and frustrated with the politics and randomness that is the City Scoop with no hope of things improving. As a reader, the Scoop may look interesting, but as a fan writer trying to get stuff published based on merit instead of who "nomnoms" on whose ankles in the staff forum, it's extremely demoralizing.
At any rate, I wanted to let everyone know why the City Traveler column has been missing so often. If you like the column, I would appreciate it if you would let the Scoop staff know that "overlooking" it like they have been is very uncool to any writer. Feel free to PM
me or
Belle with any comments, questions, or even criticisms of it.
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Tony, I sent you a PM about this. I'm sorry that you're upset, but the article was submitted at a time that meant I got it on Thursday, and we already had more than enough articles. I believe the deadline is actually midnight CST, too, but I could be wrong there. That is
my deadline, though, because I have to be in bed by midnight if I want to function the next day. That also gives me and Marty no time to copy edit. Articles are to be submitted on Wednesday with enough time for the copy editors to do their jobs.
If you had a problem with it, you should have responded as such in a PM instead of airing all of your complaints about the Scoop and its staff here. We are volunteers, and many of us have extremely hectic real lives. We cannot be expected to check our PMs every second of the day.
I have it bookmarked and ready to be proofed for our next issue. If you've changed your mind about submitting, please let me know. We certainly appreciate the work that goes into this article. I really enjoy them, and I find them to be well researched, written, and formatted.
I don't know what else to tell you other than I wish you had contacted me about this before rather than complaining about it here.
