After Dark, June 18, 2013

Fringe Fury

It's the best of times, it's the worst of times

by Gaëtan L. Charlebois

@gcharlebois

Please...patience with me this week but I have a buttload of pissed-offedness that has to express itself somehow. (Both the SO and the dog are hiding in the closet.)

I am writing this the evening before the Fringe marathon begins. We have, for this first half of the season, teams in Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto and they are all in readiness and raring to go. However, as I sit here tapping on my iPad, I am - quite on purpose - avoiding my email. In it, in these last 15 hours before the first Fringe shows our reviewers will see, will be a mountain of desperate missives of the "PLEASE COVER US!" variety. 

It's been that all week.

Then, today, I was told that companies already on the circuit a) were worried about non-coverage at the big Fringes and b) were trying to figure out the blogging scene here.

We launched out Fringe coverage with a special index on April 4. We made a lot of noise on Facebook and Twitter and asked people to share and retweet this info. Many did, and articles started to come in almost immediately. Many Fringe fest organizers helped us along. The idea was to treat the Canadian phenomenon of Fringe with the national attention it deserves. 

Now let me veer a little to make a point.

One of our columnists, Cameryn Moore, a Fringe veteran, found out she had been accepted into the mother of all Fringes, Edinburgh, a few months ago. She jumped all over that shit. She networked with people here and abroad, sussed the scene, the publications and hit the ground running. Meanwhile, CharPo was receiving email from American companies who had done what Cameryn had done: checked out the scene and found us. 

This week, two things happened. A foreign company, which had found the loot to come here, came to us 48 hours before their first show and instead of asking for coverage asked us about our readership numbers. I don’t know what happened in the three hours after that email because I think my head exploded and I blacked out. My instinct was to do one of those all-cap emails and suggest they bring their little show to the attention of one of the national dailies and see how far they got. 

Then, today, I was told that companies already on the circuit a) were worried about non-coverage at the big Fringes and b) were trying to figure out the blogging scene here in Canada. 

a) They should worry about non-coverage due to their mind-blowing lack of media savvy.

b) I can name six solid bloggers in each of their countries' of origin and why the fuck are they wasting their money if they didn't do basic research before getting on the fucking pack-boat to come here.

here I am, at the tail-end of a quarter-century of covering it

Look...I love the Fringe. I love the exploration of it, the adventure of it, the surprises and, even, the disappointments. But here I am, at the tail-end of a quarter-century of covering it - for two weeklies, a daily and this website - wondering when the companies who spend a mountain of energy, talent and money to put something up for a Fringe, will get...their...fucking...shit...together. 

Now I'm not talking about the youngsters who, like Judy and Mickey, say, "Let's do a show!" I'm talking about the semi-pros and pros who do theatre the rest of the year but, when it comes to Fringe, turn into imbeciles. 

You cannot imagine the waste of everyone's time: running after their info (dead URLs), trying to get a picture for their show (and when you get one it's too small for the net, let alone print, and is, basically, a home-made abortion), trying to get them to answer email queries, and trying to explain to them that - yes - we have a daily but they can only do so much and we are truly getting tired of being your fifth choice for coverage. 

We publish two interviews a week, minimum; we publish mountains of photos and videos; we do Sunday features; we have 7000 unique visitors each month with over 30,000 legit page-views (which doubles during the summer; ie: Fringe) and we have readers in every province and most of them are in Fringe cities.

And in the next 8 weeks we will be reviewing your show. Or, rather, the shows of the people who know their asses from their elbows.