Two tales from Texas
Posted by GreenReaper (Laurence Parry) on Sat 20 Feb 2010 - 22:11 — Edited as of Sun 21 Feb 2010 - 12:08
The Lone Star state is busy today, with Furry Fiesta underway and two stories from the area.
The first offers a take on the convention's first day from the Dallas Morning News.
The second is a blog entry about a furmeet written for 29-95, part of the Houston Chronicle.
Bonus: CBS 11 now has a piece on Furry Fiesta, of the "I thought it was about sex" variety.
[credit: Higgs Raccoon/furrymedia, dracotrapnet/furryne.ws and WildBillTX/furrymedia]
About the author
GreenReaper (Laurence Parry) — read stories — contact (login required)a developer, editor and Kai Norn from London, United Kingdom, interested in wikis and computers
Small fuzzy creature who likes cheese & carrots. Founder of WikiFur, lead admin of Inkbunny, and Editor-in-Chief of Flayrah.
Comments
'Bout time there was some decent, non-sensationalized news coverage of furry events.
It is by caffeine alone that I set my mind in motion.
It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed, hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning.
It is by caffeine alone that I set my mind in motion.
Most external media coverage is neutral to positive in tone these days. It's just that the "bad" news tends to get remembered for longer than the "good" news.
Point taken.
(Not to mention, people tend to make a bigger stink about negative coverage . . . )
It is by caffeine alone that I set my mind in motion.
It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed, hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning.
It is by caffeine alone that I set my mind in motion.
It's also quite easy to create superficial good coverage nowadays. All you have to do is take quotes from a convention press pack or website, and maybe read a Wikipedia article or two.
The result is a story that fills space, but which nobody who's part of the fandom really cares about, unless they're involved in the event concerned. It's news to them, but not to us.
In this case they went one step further and showed up with a camera, took a few photos and talked to a few people. That's about the limit if you have to file daily; there's just no time for truly detailed coverage.
Compare it to Critter Camp Out, which goes into far more depth, but also doesn't pull punches when it comes to the reporter's interpretation of the furry lifestyle and its fans.
It would appear that the misconceptions have shifted from "furries are all sex freaks" to "furries are all animal costume enthusiasts." Which is still a massive improvement by any standard, so I guess I cannot complain too much.
Oh, and there was an anthropomorphic Ratatta costume in the CBS piece. o_O
Well, some clearly still suspect we're sex freaks, they just think we dress up to do it. ;-)
It's absolutely understandable that fursuiters get the front-page treatment. A picture tells a thousand words, and it's far easier than actually reading (or writing) those thousand words, let alone the other nine thousand that can't be easily replaced by a picture. Unfortunately it means most people only get 1/10th of the story.
Post new comment