Internet Drama
This year there has been a lot of controversy surrounding various Magic articles on a variety of sites and last week was no different. Paulo Victor Damo da Rosa wrote the article ‘Everything That’s Wrong with Battle for Zendikar’ for Channel Fireball. It’s a well written article, I don’t particularly agree with Paulo but he does make his points. This article sat on the front page of Channel Fireball for a day before being replaced by Travis Woo’s article ‘8 Reasons to Be Excited About Battle for Zendikar,’ an article that I find myself more in agreement with.
I refuse to apologize for the bad puns
And You’re Telling Me This Why?
At some point, after it had been up for about a day, Paulo’s article was back dated to September 16th (from September 21st) and was subsequently removed from the front page. It did not take long for the reddit conspiracies started flying. It was suggested that Channel Fireball was attempting to limit the spread of information in order to better sell cards during the pre-order period and that Travis’s follow up article had only been written to fix the damage of Paulo’s. Channel Fireball does sell cards after all and it was declared that they had proven themselves untrustworthy at best for information.
Why I Think This Is Crap
First of all there is no way that Travis had enough lead time to put together his article as a rebuttal, most blogs have your articles due earlier than that (including Hipsters). Most likely they had both separately decided on article topics ahead of time and I would not be shocked if they were not aware of what the other was writing or when it was coming out. I’ve spoken to various writers (though none from CFB) and we were all on the same page in regards to this.
In addition, I have serious doubts that CFB would want to hide the article. If they truly had a problem with what Paulo wrote they probably wouldn’t have published it to begin with. Yes, they publish their articles as a way to get traffic to their website to sell cards, just like Star City Games and countless other websites do, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t put out good quality articles. I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone who believed that the articles from LSV, Pascal Maynard and others aren’t topnotch.
However, to me, the most important part is, they didn’t take it down. They left it up, anyone can still read it, nor was it hidden in the bowels of the internet. There is nothing wrong with a website de-emphasizing an article, especially after it has been up for a day, this is pretty normal. Most blogs, including Hipsters, change what articles are on the front page daily, that’s standard practice. Magic players tend to consume content quite quickly, replacing articles daily is an important part of running a successful website.
Going Forward
While I think it’s extremely important to hold authors and news websites to a high standard of respect and responsibility that we shouldn’t assume that someone is being nefarious. Often the correct answer is the simplest one, in this case it was they had a newer article to post.
Wallpaper of the Week
If you read my normal weekly column you’re aware that I’ve got a lot of love for his card. A creature is destroyed just because it’s aware of a big dude’s existence? That’s pretty sick. I think they captured the essence and the flavor of this card pretty well. The large head of the Eldrazi in the background with a Kor being blown to pieces.
Grade: A+