Exasperating adventures in music criticism; come up with one better than this: in late December, I pitched a CD review idea to a publication I will not name, in conjunction with a show to occur in la

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Can you top this?

― Raymond Cummings (Raymond Cummings), Thursday, 17 February 2005 20:48 (twenty-one years ago)

holy long title

― mike h. (mike h.), Thursday, 17 February 2005 20:49 (twenty-one years ago)

there are worse. believe me.

― Matos-Webster Dictionary (M Matos), Thursday, 17 February 2005 20:50 (twenty-one years ago)

Your thread title exceeds our word count guidelines...please edit and resubmit

- Ed.

― M@tt He1geson (Matt Helgeson), Thursday, 17 February 2005 20:51 (twenty-one years ago)

it's worse when you've done a live review, and when you deliver it, everybody looks befuddled at you, because no-one has heard about it coming.

― Jay-Kid (Jay-Kid), Thursday, 17 February 2005 20:53 (twenty-one years ago)

Editors are mysterious beings, visible only to pure-hearted children and puppy dogs.

― Huk-L, Thursday, 17 February 2005 20:59 (twenty-one years ago)

that is frankly appalling. what was said editor's excuse for such inexcusably twattish behaviour?

x-post: it's even worse being the sub who has to then redraw a page one second before deadline in order to deal with the live review that etc etc etc.

― grimly fiendish (grimlord), Thursday, 17 February 2005 21:04 (twenty-one years ago)

it's hardly like you reviewing this band live was an "idea" someone stole, i mean if it was a music publication they would most likely have reviewed the thing anyway... or is it?i think we need more info.

― jed_ (jed), Thursday, 17 February 2005 21:04 (twenty-one years ago)

There are worse things than being asked to write a review unexpectedly.

― Joseph McCombs (Joseph McCombs), Thursday, 17 February 2005 21:37 (twenty-one years ago)

yes, but if i'd been pitching an idea for two months and had no reply, and was then asked: "oy you, where's your copy?" i'd be a bit peeved an' all.

my boss (the editor) is away this week so i'm desperately trying to reply to the various pitches she's getting ... i hardly have the time to do this, but it's basic courtesy, innit? as a freelance, being ignored is painful and costly.

also: now i'm on the other side of the fence, so to speak, i'm very aware that if you piss a good freelance off, there are many other places who'll snap them up.

― grimly fiendish (grimlord), Thursday, 17 February 2005 21:51 (twenty-one years ago)

glad to see "pitching ideas and being ignored" is pretty common, lol.

― Rizz (Rizz), Thursday, 17 February 2005 21:55 (twenty-one years ago)

Your editor should have told you he or she would let you know closer to the date of the show whether a show review was needed. (Writers often expect me to assign sound of the city live reviews months in advance, which is impossible, since there's no way I could know then what space limitations might be, or what other, more interesting, shows I might prefer reviews of -- or even whether I'll be running a sound of the city page at all in the wake of the show. Writers may well think I leave them hanging by not assigning the review until the week before the actual show, but there's not much way around it. On the other hand, I try to make it a point to tell the writers, when they pitch {and when they, pointlessly and often annoyingly, re-pitch and re-pitch and re-pitch} the show that "I'll keep it in mind." That's what your editor should've done; maybe it's what he or she meant to do. But quite possibly, the editor didn't *know* until now whether a review was needed. Sounds to me like you're free to do the review, or to say you can't. Like Joseph says, how big a problem is that?)

― chuck, Thursday, 17 February 2005 21:58 (twenty-one years ago)

(And just to be clear, if I *didn't* reply, I'd have no reason to complain as I do above about the re-re-re-pitching. I tend to reply to pitches almost immmediately, in most cases -- often, the second I get the email. So yeah, if your editor didn't reply at all, and then acted like an assignment had been made, I agree - that's very inept.)

― chuck, Thursday, 17 February 2005 22:01 (twenty-one years ago)

In retrospect, I probably made a bigger deal out of this than I needed to. But a lot of it is that I spent a lot of time and energy trying to reach this person (not just in ref. to this review) before giving up completely, only to get this latest email.

When I told him that I’d never heard back from him about the piece, he replied that it was on a schedule he sent to everyone. I explained that I’d never received a single schedule from him, and that I could still do the review but wouldn’t be able to write it and get it to him until Monday, to which he replied “Nevermind” and nothing more. So I think I’m just plain DONE with this particular publication, which has been nothing but a hassle since I started dealing with it – for all of the annoyance, I’ve only had one published piece that I haven’t yet received payment for.

I shouldn’t be surprised, after being dicked around by another music editor at another paper owned by the same chain back in 2003.

Maybe this is a sign (this, and recent misadventures with other snarky/absent editors) that I need to just be satisfied with the pool of publications I work for, and stop pushing for more exposure/options. The five editors I have are great (two of which I work for in very large measure because I met them here!) and v. responsive (responsive not necessarily meaning that all my pitches are accepted, but that they are considered and responded to – seems like a given but it isn’t always) and anything more would be overextending, really.

― Raymond Cummings (Raymond Cummings), Friday, 18 February 2005 15:31 (twenty-one years ago)

When I made my first (and only, so far) review pitch to Chuck, I was all ready to not get a response of any kind for weeks. After all, the Voice is one of the biggest alt-weeklies in the country, and he's a busy man. So imagine my amazement when he rejected it within two hours of my pitching it? Ultimately the pitch itself wasn't all that great, sure....but it meant a hell of a lot to me that he took a minute out of his busy schedule to read it and write back.

― Raymond Cummings (Raymond Cummings), Friday, 18 February 2005 16:01 (twenty-one years ago)

Which newspaper chain, Raymond?

― frankfardin, Friday, 18 February 2005 17:39 (twenty-one years ago)

I'd rather not say.

― Raymond Cummings (Raymond Cummings), Friday, 18 February 2005 18:11 (twenty-one years ago)

Another good one is editors who ask me to "take one for the team" by taking on heavily researched, low-paying pieces on very short deadlines (and sometimes not even a byline), with the promise of future work. Which never arrives... until the NEXT time they need me to "take one for the team."

I've also had editors who have done essentially what Raymond's did, except I pitch them a piece, they never respond, and then they e-mail me demanding the "late" piece.

Best of all are the editors who respond to a pitch right away and say "that's interesting, let me think about it and get back to you next week," don't respond to follow-ups next week or the week after, and then when it's too late to pitch it anywhere else, write and say "sorry it's taken so long to get back to you--actually I assigned it to someone else a long while ago."

― still quietness, Friday, 18 February 2005 18:47 (twenty-one years ago)

maybe you should stop pitching review ideas in the email title field...?

― gygax! (gygax!), Friday, 18 February 2005 18:53 (twenty-one years ago)

Has anyone ever written something, been published, and then not been paid for it? What's the bets way to deal with this if/when it happens?

― ng, Friday, 18 February 2005 19:42 (twenty-one years ago)

Has anyone ever written something, been published, and then not been paid for it? What's the bets way to deal with this if/when it happens?

This happened to me once with a more technology-oriented publication. I subscribe to the notion that one catches more flies with honey than with vinegar, so I sent a kind note to the managing editor and asked for the name of someone in Accounts Payable I could follow up with so that the managing editor wouldn't have to field calls/emails on the matter. It took several weeks but I did eventually receive all the money I was due.

― Joseph McCombs (Joseph McCombs), Friday, 18 February 2005 19:48 (twenty-one years ago)

I did that for a while once when a former employer of mine (for whom I'd been freelancing after that) owed me several thousand dollars for over a year. There was a guy I was supposed to call about "all money-related things." I made it a point to call him every single day for about a month--as politely as possible--until he finally came through with the check just to get me off his back.

― Douglas (Douglas), Friday, 18 February 2005 21:43 (twenty-one years ago)

>editors who respond to a pitch right away and say "that's interesting, let me think about it and get back to you next week," don't respond to follow-ups next week or the week after, and then when it's too late to pitch it anywhere else, write and say "sorry it's taken so long to get back to you--actually I assigned it to someone else a long while ago."<

Not to defend the editor, but what was stopping you from pitching it elsewhere when this editor was clearly ambivalent about the piece? I don't get that....

― chuck, Friday, 18 February 2005 22:01 (twenty-one years ago)

Has anyone ever written something, been published, and then not been paid for it? What's the bets way to deal with this if/when it happens?

Ha-ha. CREEM magazine and its spin-offs a couple years and up to right before it tanked permanently.

― George Smith, Friday, 18 February 2005 22:23 (twenty-one years ago)

five years pass...

Wait - what did the title originally say??? :(

― Kevin John Bozelka, Sunday, 16 May 2010 23:38 (sixteen years ago)

You have to work it out from clues left for you in the thread

― Matt #2, Sunday, 16 May 2010 23:42 (sixteen years ago)

once you determine the correct title, you can then rearrange the letters to spell the name of the location where a precious emerald peacock is buried

― sleepingbag, Sunday, 16 May 2010 23:46 (sixteen years ago)

christ, i'd been looking at this for 15 minutes thinking "what.. what is going on here...?"

― village idiot (dog latin), Monday, 17 May 2010 14:13 (sixteen years ago)

^^^

me too

― he's always been a bit of an anti-climb Max (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Monday, 17 May 2010 14:22 (sixteen years ago)

haha i was exchanging e-mails w/ Ray this weekend and asked him to clear this up

― couldn't think of anything to write instead of 'steendriver' (some dude), Monday, 17 May 2010 14:25 (sixteen years ago)

Cummings, Raymond to me
show details 9:14 AM (24 minutes ago)
Oh, man. I have no idea what I was even talking about there.

― couldn't think of anything to write instead of 'steendriver' (some dude), Tuesday, 18 May 2010 13:39 (sixteen years ago)

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