Showing posts with label Examiner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Examiner. Show all posts
Monday, May 21, 2012
Classic Films in Focus moves to blog
After posting classic movie reviews on Examiner.com for three years, I have decided to move all future reviews and Classic Movie 10 pieces to the Virtual Virago site. News items and other short pieces will continue to appear on Examiner.com for both the National Classic Movies and Huntsville Classic Movies titles, but recent changes at Examiner make it clear that I ought to move my most valuable and time-consuming content to a more congenial format. Check back here at Virtual Virago for classic movie reviews and top ten lists in the near future! You can also find more of my posts about classic movies over at The Cinementals, which brings together a lot of classic movie bloggers to provide an amazing array of classic movie news and content.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
How to Write Reviews
People often assume that writing a review of something is a very simple process. You watch/read/attend the subject in question, and then you give your opinion about it, right? There's a lot more to it, though, if you want to do it right. The steps aren't particularly hard to follow, but they do require some thought.
I started writing reviews of restaurants, theater performances, and various arts and culture events back in college. I even won an award for my column during my senior year, but the best part was getting free tickets and press passes to events that I could never afford to attend on my own dime. Now I write mostly film reviews for Examiner.com as the National Classic Movies Examiner. Over the years, I have also had to teach review writing to college composition students. At any rate, I've got some experience with the process, and you can probably trust my advice.
First, you need to watch/read/attend the subject in question, but you also need to develop a broader sense of the category to which it belongs. Go to a lot of plays, see a lot of movies, eat at a lot of restaurants before you start reviewing them. Get a sense of the range and the history of your subject. You are more credible as a reviewer and will be able to offer a more balanced opinion.
Second, do a little research to see what other people have to say. I generally read IMDB, look for reviews from respected critics, and spend at least an hour brushing up on material relating to the film before I write. For film reviews, the bonus features and commentaries on DVDs and Blu-rays can be a great resource. Build up a personal library of books and go-to websites that you will rely on when you write. You will not want to repeat what these sources say, but you will want to know what is generally thought and be able to establish your own review as something distinctive but well-informed.
Third, start writing. You review should provide some basic information about the item in question, but it should have a clear structure that targets a few key aspects that you want to emphasize. Do not attempt to exhaust the subject. Pick two or three elements - either good or bad - and explain their effect on the overall experience. For a restaurant these might be service, ambience, and the food itself. For a film, these might be a particular performance, a theme, or a technical aspect. For films, plays, and books, be sure to keep plot summary to a minimum. NEVER tell the whole story! Avoid spoilers as much as possible. All too often I read film "reviews" that are really just extended plot synopses. Make sure that your review has a clear structure with well-defined paragraphs. It ought to go without saying that the review should be grammatically correct and free from any distracting technical problems with spacing, punctuation, font, etc.
Finally, read what you have written! Good proofreading skills are invaluable to writers of every kind. Especially if your work will appear in print or online, you want it to represent your best effort.
Good luck with your review!
I started writing reviews of restaurants, theater performances, and various arts and culture events back in college. I even won an award for my column during my senior year, but the best part was getting free tickets and press passes to events that I could never afford to attend on my own dime. Now I write mostly film reviews for Examiner.com as the National Classic Movies Examiner. Over the years, I have also had to teach review writing to college composition students. At any rate, I've got some experience with the process, and you can probably trust my advice.
First, you need to watch/read/attend the subject in question, but you also need to develop a broader sense of the category to which it belongs. Go to a lot of plays, see a lot of movies, eat at a lot of restaurants before you start reviewing them. Get a sense of the range and the history of your subject. You are more credible as a reviewer and will be able to offer a more balanced opinion.
Second, do a little research to see what other people have to say. I generally read IMDB, look for reviews from respected critics, and spend at least an hour brushing up on material relating to the film before I write. For film reviews, the bonus features and commentaries on DVDs and Blu-rays can be a great resource. Build up a personal library of books and go-to websites that you will rely on when you write. You will not want to repeat what these sources say, but you will want to know what is generally thought and be able to establish your own review as something distinctive but well-informed.
Third, start writing. You review should provide some basic information about the item in question, but it should have a clear structure that targets a few key aspects that you want to emphasize. Do not attempt to exhaust the subject. Pick two or three elements - either good or bad - and explain their effect on the overall experience. For a restaurant these might be service, ambience, and the food itself. For a film, these might be a particular performance, a theme, or a technical aspect. For films, plays, and books, be sure to keep plot summary to a minimum. NEVER tell the whole story! Avoid spoilers as much as possible. All too often I read film "reviews" that are really just extended plot synopses. Make sure that your review has a clear structure with well-defined paragraphs. It ought to go without saying that the review should be grammatically correct and free from any distracting technical problems with spacing, punctuation, font, etc.
Finally, read what you have written! Good proofreading skills are invaluable to writers of every kind. Especially if your work will appear in print or online, you want it to represent your best effort.
Good luck with your review!
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Horror and Gothic film reviews on Examiner.com
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)*
Nosferatu (1922)*
The Cat and the Canary (1927)*
Dracula (1931)*
Frankenstein (1931)*
White Zombie (1932)*
The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)*
Dracula’s Daughter (1936)*
Son of Frankenstein (1939)*
Rebecca (1940)*
The Wolf Man (1941)*
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941)
Cat People (1942)*
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)*
The Lodger (1944)*
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)*
Bedlam (1946)*
Sunset Blvd. (1950)
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
Night of the Demon (1957)
The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)*
Horror of Dracula (1958)*
Village of the Damned (1960)
Eyes Without a Face (1960)*
Carnival of Souls (1962)*
The Raven (1963)
The Comedy of Terrors (1963)
The Haunting (1963)*
Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)*
Young Frankenstein (1974)
Also relevant is this post about classic movies and Gothic romance.*
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Classic Movies Examiner statistics, October 2011
Google Analytics provides interesting data about traffic to my Examiner columns, which I use to think about improving my audience flow and my search results. The National Classic Movies column yields some especially fun information because it has a larger market and attracts more readers than the Huntsville column. I can find out all kinds of things about my audience, including a city-by-city count of pageviews (which, among other things, tells me which of my friends is actually reading my work because I know where you live!). Here's some of the more noteworthy data for the last year of the National Classic Movies column.
Total visits as of October 26, 2011 - 18,201 (unique visits)
Total pageviews - 21,808 (total pages viewed)
Of those hits, roughly 78% came from searches on Google and other engines, meaning that most of my traffic comes from people who don't know me or subscribe to the column. They find the articles by entering search terms related to something they want to know. This means that it's very important for me to improve the search term visibility of my articles because the bulk of my traffic depends on it. Because most of the visits come from searches, it's not surprising that 70% of my visitors are one-time readers, accounting for 12,821 of the total pageviews.
About 9% of my traffic comes from direct visits, either through the Examiner site or subscriber email alerts. Only about 5% comes from Facebook links. Twitter accounts for even smaller percentage. With more than 400 FB "friends" and over 360 Twitter followers, you might think these numbers would be higher, but so far only a handful of people on those feeds pay any attention to the links I post. (And thanks, by the way, if you happen to be one of them!) Ideally, I need to increase the number of "likes," shares, and retweets to increase readership from those sources, but I'm not really sure how to make that happen (maybe if I added photos of kittens with poor grammar and spelling skills?).
Number of countries represented - 121
Top 5 countries - US, Canada, UK, Australia, the Netherlands (that last one surprises me)
Top 5 cities - Huntsville (685), New York (491), Los Angeles (313), Chicago (233), Houston (150)
Top 3 articles (and the only ones to crack 1000 hits each) -
Rango revels in classic movie references
Leslie Nielsen, classic film actor, dead at 84
Classic movie star deaths in 2010 and 2011
The "Rango" article stands at 4726, the Nielsen obit at 2339, and the deaths list at 1391. The "Classic films in focus" articles actually tend to be the lowest performers, although I stubbornly persist in writing them. The "Classic movie 10" columns do rather better, depending on the topic, with a list of "Christmas Carol" films being the top performer thus far.
On one level, this information encourages me - hey, 121 countries! - but on another level it frustrates me because I have yet to attain the kind of real, regular readership I'd like to have. I need to grow my audience enough to be able to call myself a writer in good conscience once I stop being a college professor next year. If anybody has any ideas about how to do a better job with that, I'm all ears!
Total visits as of October 26, 2011 - 18,201 (unique visits)
Total pageviews - 21,808 (total pages viewed)
Of those hits, roughly 78% came from searches on Google and other engines, meaning that most of my traffic comes from people who don't know me or subscribe to the column. They find the articles by entering search terms related to something they want to know. This means that it's very important for me to improve the search term visibility of my articles because the bulk of my traffic depends on it. Because most of the visits come from searches, it's not surprising that 70% of my visitors are one-time readers, accounting for 12,821 of the total pageviews.
About 9% of my traffic comes from direct visits, either through the Examiner site or subscriber email alerts. Only about 5% comes from Facebook links. Twitter accounts for even smaller percentage. With more than 400 FB "friends" and over 360 Twitter followers, you might think these numbers would be higher, but so far only a handful of people on those feeds pay any attention to the links I post. (And thanks, by the way, if you happen to be one of them!) Ideally, I need to increase the number of "likes," shares, and retweets to increase readership from those sources, but I'm not really sure how to make that happen (maybe if I added photos of kittens with poor grammar and spelling skills?).
Number of countries represented - 121
Top 5 countries - US, Canada, UK, Australia, the Netherlands (that last one surprises me)
Top 5 cities - Huntsville (685), New York (491), Los Angeles (313), Chicago (233), Houston (150)
Top 3 articles (and the only ones to crack 1000 hits each) -
Rango revels in classic movie references
Leslie Nielsen, classic film actor, dead at 84
Classic movie star deaths in 2010 and 2011
The "Rango" article stands at 4726, the Nielsen obit at 2339, and the deaths list at 1391. The "Classic films in focus" articles actually tend to be the lowest performers, although I stubbornly persist in writing them. The "Classic movie 10" columns do rather better, depending on the topic, with a list of "Christmas Carol" films being the top performer thus far.
On one level, this information encourages me - hey, 121 countries! - but on another level it frustrates me because I have yet to attain the kind of real, regular readership I'd like to have. I need to grow my audience enough to be able to call myself a writer in good conscience once I stop being a college professor next year. If anybody has any ideas about how to do a better job with that, I'm all ears!
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