Thanks to Mike Dean and Dirk Deppey posting it online and a sleepless Sunday evening, I was able to find some time to read the summary about comics news sources, "Online Comics Journalism: Does It Exist? Part 9: The Report Card."

I felt the article was arrogant, asinine and kind of ridiculous. Ironically, it was poorly reported, too. Here are a few objections, and I apologize in advance for not having the time to go over Mike's piece more thoroughly.

1. The premise is false. Even Mike fairly admits his premise is a false one when he states that the vast majority of people he talked to make no claim to write news. He never makes a solid case why any of the people he talks to should be held to his standard other than to assert it really strongly and over and over again. There are plenty of responsible ways this premise could have been tested, perhaps by contextual comparison or by calling on some of the numerous people who cover this arena. Clearly the bulk of what's been done by Online Journalism Review and by other news sources suggests there's value in alternate approaches to coverage. What we're getting is Mike Dean's opinion of what makes journalism, which according to his definition, isn't journalism.

2. Although this is supposedly a lesson in methodology, I can't even figure out what months were covered in this report card. Because we don't know how different posts were counted, we don't know how Mike comes to his characterization. One suspects by his description of what you can find on such sites that he counts blog postings not intended to be news and perhaps even those clearly marked as such as some sort of category of "poor news" or "not news," which if true is as backwards as counting reviews in The Comics Journal as items of "poor news," "not news." But we don't know, because he hasn't told us. The general argument applies, too: I'll tell you how many pieces of what I consider journalism I ran on my site in any two month period. Zero!

3. Mike loads his argument in general by excluding a couple of sites that write sourced news. One such is ActuaBd.com. Another is EditorandPublisher.com. There are others I'll let you suss out. I have no idea why certain sites get short shrift; perhaps it's because they're not perceived as competitors to the news Mike writes at the Journal. They should at least have been noted and disqualified.

4. Mike loads up his argument on site signal to noise by offering up a grossly misleading statement about my posting habits. Every day at ComicsReporter.com, I lead off with a post of several links to interesting stories of the day. This is very, very, very obviously by any rational measure a single post with multiple links, easily comparable to multiple print news sources that run round-ups on several items in a single story. By Mike's logic, some beat reporters routinely turn in dozens of news articles a day!

5. Mike loads up his argument about cannibalization by offering up a second falsehood about my site. To say "Essentially, The Comics Reporter reports on two things: information disseminated by the comics Web community and what Spurgeon thinks about that information" is simply not true. As anyone who reads the site knows, the aggregator function of the newsblog part of the CR site extends its reach far outside the realm of the "comics Web community" to draw on traditional news sources, European first-run comics news, and when worthy of attention, first-person generated writing that hasn't been disseminated elsewhere.

6. This section could make the "No Shit, Sherlock" Hall of Fame, although Mike has to ruin it by trying to analyze what I freely admit up front. Also, I fear voters may split the vote between various portions of Mike's article.

   "Comics Reporter is a classic case of the Web's tendency to cannibalize itself, and there is no evidence of communication between Spurgeon and any of his news sources either in person, by phone or by exchange of e-mails. One tip was noted in the Journal's study, but neither the tip nor any of the press releases Spurgeon reported showed any sign of having been followed up with questions. Even Q&As were nonexistent on his site."

   I never claim to have contact with sources beyond linking to articles or stating, "I have a tip," so I can only take Mike's incredulous discovery after looking into the matter as a snotty, sideways implication that I'm somehow suggesting I do this. I think most people know how an aggregate newsblog functions at this point -- well, maybe not Mike -- and to let the suggestion linger I'm getting away with something is pretty insulting.

   What's additionally weird about this is I just picked up an issue of the Journal and literally the first news story I open to in one of Mike's recent news sections is a brief on Hinako Sigiura's passing that not only "contains no evidence of communication" between the Journal and some news source, it doesn't even cite a previously published article or wire report! That's some amazing coverage there.

7. You misreported my current relationship with The Pulse in a way that has a direct impact on the points you make regarding the thoroughness of that publication's coverage. Here's the skinny: I'm sticking around on staff to work off back-debt to The Pulse at this point, not working full-time as per Rick Veitch's admirable commitment to find someone who can do 10 hard news stories a month at The Pulse. We worked that out in like April. You never fact-checked this, although you're happy to suggest alternate explanations for the change in volume and the general scarcity of my contributions.

8. It should go without saying, but the Journal participates in a lot of the same practices it castigates here. You use unnamed sources, you're not only close to certain people in comics you work at a comic-book company, you cite previously published sources like statements on chatroom threads when it suits your needs, you run your fair share of briefs without follow-up, and your magazine has a wider identity than simply running news pieces. Somewhat more interestingly, I feel like pointing out that when the Journal was a younger publication like many of these online magazines, its news section read a lot like a printed blog. I bet as many of the sites develop, they will develop the capacity for frequent, sourced news reports, just as the Journal did, and some might even pursue that area of coverage.

9. The funniest and saddest thing about this series as it's embodied in this piece -- I didn't read any of the individual pieces, nor have I read the Journal's news section in almost a year -- is that it doesn't go after the most disappointing, shittiest source of Web news out there: tcj.com, which seems to exist as a Mike Dean vanity vehicle by getting whatever breaking stories come to the Journal out there and to put up "controversial" pieces. If you're going to hold everyone else to a standard they disavow, you might think about holding yourselves to a standard you feel so strongly about.

Overall, I can see one article about online news coverage, because people in multiples of the Journal's readership are gathering and accessing what comics news they feel they desire in various ways online now. They're using Google, they're using newsblogs, they're going to chatrooms where people spill the beans and are either countered or not countered. Heidi MacDonald speaks for no one but Heidi MacDonald in an official sense, but there are probably people out there satisfied with the news they're getting in never cracking an issue of the Journal, and it'd be interesting to trace why that is and what it means. Such an article would require a degree of self-criticism that the Journal likely doesn't have right now.

Doing a series on why sites that say they aren't practicing sourced journalism fail to practice sourced journalism one after the other for months on end seems like one of those long jokes that you're supposed to laugh at because it goes on and on past all point of being reasonable. What's next, a series of articles about how interviews on websites don't match up to the Journal's standard for researched interviews so they're not the real in-depth interview sites they don't claim to be? This would all be funny if it were at least reported with some semblance of the standards laid at the feet of the article's subjects. As it is, I think I'll have my name off the masthead now.

Michael Dean replies:

1. Tom, I thought "calling on some of the numerous people who cover this arena" was exactly what the series was doing for eight segments over the past year. And what do you call this final segment, which consists of nothing but people who cover this arena talking about online comics news and the series? My premise was that somewhere in the World Wide Web there should be room for serious journalistic coverage of the comics industry and that so far a consistent place for such coverage doesn't appear to exist. I don't admit that that premise is false. My criteria for "what makes journalism" were spelled out in the series and are repeated in this issue's segment. Do you disagree that those are necessary elements of journalism?

2. Looks like our numbers match, then. Actually, the article explained at some length how stories were categorized. Since virtually all the online comics-news sources the Journal interviewed, including The Comics Reporter, identified themselves as blogs, yes, blog postings were not only included, they were pretty much all we found. In the case of The Comics Reporter, all posts under the heading "CR Briefing: Daily Blog" were counted. Those under the heading "CR Reviews" or "Commentary" or "Letters" or "Resources" or anything else that was clearly not meant to suggest an offer of news was not counted. As for what months were covered in the report-card table of data, the clue to that is to be found in the caption beneath the table, which says, "all news posts on site from Aug. 2 to Oct. 2, 2005."

3. One of the first questions I asked of each comics-news reporter with whom I spoke was "What comics news sites do you visit regularly or recommend as worthwhile?" Whenever a site was named, it was added to the list of sites to be covered. No site was disqualified on the grounds that it identified the sources of its news. The seven comics news sites in the series all recommended each other, with each name coming up repeatedly. When I asked you this question, you did not recommend any sites that were not ultimately included in the series. At the time, you didn't see fit to mention either ActuaBD.com or EditorandPublisher.com, possibly because the first site is in French and the second is not a comics-news site.

4. When a single story contained multiple links, it was counted as a single story. When there were different, unrelated links to separate, unrelated stories, they were each counted separately. As very, very, very bizarre as it may seem, that's the way "Mike's logic" operates. Does that mean that some beat reporters were found to have posted dozens of stories a day, many of them no more than links to other sites? Yes. As the article pointed out, links are not bad in and of themselves. How they affect the signal-to-noise ratio depends on whether they link to signals or noise. But the chart tells you how many of the total posts on a site consisted of nothing more than a link to another site. If including them in the total offends you, it's a simple matter to subtract the link-onlys from the total. In the case of The Comics Reporter, that means, instead of reporting 715 stories during the two-month period, you reported 74.

5. Here, I evidently didn't communicate as well as I might have. When I said, "comics Web community," the operative word to me was "Web," whereas you have obviously fastened on the word "comics." As far as I'm concerned, it's enough for something to appear on a website and then be linked to by a comics-themed site for it to become part of the comics Web community. In other words, there's nothing you could have linked to that wouldn't have automatically become a branch of that community. Certainly, a site reporting first-run European comics news would not be beyond the reach of the comics Web community. When you say you draw on "traditional news sources," I assume you're not referring to a town crier, but to something like nytimes.com. But when Tom Spurgeon links to a comics-related story on nytimes.com, that becomes part of the comics Web community. No idea what you mean by "first-person generated writing." I've yet to see writing that wasn't generated by a person. And if by "first-person" you mean Tom Spurgeon, during the two months your site was under observation, I rarely, if ever, saw you generate writing that wasn't inspired, suggested or provoked by something you saw on another site. Even your response here seems to be based entirely on what you read on the Journal's website. My point, as you note, was that the Web cannibalizes itself, with each site feeding off other sites, which feed off still other sites, ad nauseum. My lament was that far more often than not, comics news on the Web is simply an echo of comics news on the Web with no effort to verify or explore it in the real world.

6. Well, I never claimed that you claimed to have contact with sources, and no innuendo about the veracity of your presentation was intended. The article simply states the sad facts of the case. I don't regard you as getting away with something any more than I regard any of the other numerous comics-related "aggregate newsblogs" as getting away with something. The only implication -- and there's nothing sideways about it -- is that it's unfortunate that virtually all ambition in the online comics-news world seems to have found its zenith in the aggregate newsblog.

   As you well know, Tom, the Journal is indebted to you for the invention of its regular Datebook feature, which is the closest thing the print Journal has to a news blog. Greg Stump carries on its very valuable function as a record of noteworthy comics-related news during the period covered by a given issue. To a large extent, Datebook exists simply to round up news that has been widely reported in various venues, including the news brief that you cite. If the news is that a Will Eisner or a Hinako Sigiura has died, it's enough to pass the information on without tracking it down to the individual doctor who signed the death certificate. Nevertheless, when someone is quoted or information is imparted that comes from a single source, it's always our intention to identify that source even in Datebook. And of course, even if the role of Datebook resembles that of a news blog, news in the Journal does not stop at Datebook or its news-brief-gathering function. My complaint about The Comics Reporter and all the other sites in the series is that their news coverage does stop at just such a function.

7. I'm not sure what you're referring to here, since the story doesn't say anything about a change in volume at The Pulse or a scarcity of your contributions there, let alone offer an explanation for those things. It's true there is no update in Part 9 of the working relationship that was originally described when you were interviewed for Part 4, but it wasn't really the intent of Part 9 to update all the previous segments.

8. I certainly hope so, Tom. The aim of the series was not to point a finger, but to encourage just that kind of development. It's true that the Journal's print status doesn't prevent it from having to deal with many of the issues you mention, though I would make one important qualification. Despite your concluding contention that the magazine consistently reports unsourced news, the Journal uses unnamed sources only for the most general kind of background information. I might assert something in a story based on impressions I have gained from years of talking to comics-industry professionals, but I'm very resistant to going off the record and I can't think of any instance in which I broke a news story without identifying the source of that news.

9. The Comics Journal is a print magazine. Aside from the Comics Journal message board, tcj.com exists largely as a way to let people know when an issue is coming out and what will be appearing in it. The news stories that are archived on it are, for the most part, selections or excerpts from the magazine. Occasionally, the site may supplement the print magazine by updating a story with information that broke after a given issue went to press. Many online reporters interviewed by the Journal had high praise for Dirk Deppey's ¡Journalista! blog, and most identified it as a comics-news destination that they would recommend if Dirk hadn't had to discontinue it in order to take over the Journal's managing-editor reins, but Dirk would be the first to admit that tcj.com has always been an adjunct to the magazine. While it's possible the role of the site might be expanded to include more original material in the future, the Journal is focused on the possibilities of the print magazine and is not the best model for exploring the potentialities of the Web. You and your colleagues are the ones who need to be setting that particular bar.

The online news sources covered in the series are different enough from one another that I decided each Web reporter deserved a chance to talk about his or her site's particular goals and difficulties. You might be a better judge of that decision if you had read any of the other segments in the series. And while the series didn't suggest that the Web should be capable of presenting interviews as thorough and in-depth as The Comics Journal's, I'm not sure why you find that such a hilarious proposition.

In general, I'm sorry to see you respond in such a self-defensive manner to the series' analysis. I would have been more interested to hear you talk about ways that online comics-news coverage can be and, perhaps, is being improved. But it's probably true that the perspective necessary for self-criticism is hard to come by, whether your venue is a comics-news magazine or a comics-news site. For example, on the subject of a typical website's ability to reach a far vaster audience on a given day than a corresponding print magazine can reach, I would be inclined to suggest that the public's growing preference for bite-size news nuggets and heavily illustrated celebrity gossip over in-depth reportage and analysis of important issues is not necessarily a sign of the latter's failings. So maybe a Web journalist is needed to tell that story from a different perspective. Any time The Comics Reporter cares to pursue such a story and check it against a flesh-and-blood source, as I did the online-comics-news series, I'm here for you.

Dirk Deppey adds:

Name removed, as requested.