Fleen, a senior webcomics group blog with a long history, has been the domain of Gary Tyrrell for some time now. Read it yourself, you can form your own conclusions.
The most recent article is a critique of work I presented earlier this week. The most recent comment there is by me, addressing that article. I hope you will enjoy reading both. It's more entertaining than the work.
At some point, we have to figure out if bloggers are going to follow the code of journalists, or if a free-for-all atmosphere allows articles of lower merit to be treated just as respectfully. I was educated and have worked as a journalist, and I tend to stick to the ethics approach.
Given that I link to Fleen on multiple sites and routinely route people with news I can't cover in his direction, that I only became angry with him twice: once for insulting colleagues behind their back (in private writing sent to me) and once because I misread a piece but apologized when I realized my error; and given that I have always tried to be good humored in any dealings, I am amazed that he could write a major article attacking and berating my work without bothering to speak to me. He is free to publish whatever conclusions he wants, but he would have saved himself some embarrassment today had he checked some very basic facts.
It doesn't make me happy to humiliate people, and I sometimes wonder if the ones who come back, attacking, again and again, with unsupported arguments and notions of opinions being equal to fact, aren't somehow suffering from a sort of self-loathing. They don't seem happy. You wonder how they stay anchored at all, given their willingness to believe only when it suits their purposes.
Gary isn't that bad -- some of his conclusions may even be due to my own deficits in communicating well. What's bad is the obvious malice, the relish with which the article was pieced together over the week, the strutting. I don't deserve it.
Oh, well, as a loved one says, it's all fodder for the comics.
