The P.O.V. Blog's Tom Roston had a piece up yesterday criticizing us (although not by name) for the pieces we wrote last month about financial troubles at THINKFilm. (You can find our original posts here, here, here and here.) In the piece, Roston gets THINKFilm President Mark Urman on the record not so much about the state of affairs at THINK but about the speculation about the state of affairs at THINK. Says Urman:
"If one wants to chronicle the woes, one is simply adding to them. Thus far, all the writers who purport to set the record straight do so by recapitulating all the half-truths and false assumptions only to halfheartedly refute them. I am stymied as to why so many film writers are much quicker to cover our problems than they are to cover our films."
While Roston acknowledges that Urman hasn't said much about the current state of THINK, he argues that Urman's remarks are "a fair assessment of the overall vibe that the blog-media-complex is treating THINKFilm like the latest chum thrown in the water".
Earlier in his piece, Roston ridicules the posts themselves, arguing that they were little more than gossip:
"A lot of the "reporting" on the issue has referenced unnamed sources, and there's been a notable lack of comment from Bergstein or ThinkFilm. It appears that some of the "reporters" didn't even seek comment from the subjects. And lest we forget, a lawsuit is just a legal claim, not a statement of fact. Not that I'm saying there's no truth in the matter, but I've just been bothered by how the rumors have surfaced as news when, really, there have been very few hard news stories (there's been one Variety piece) covering the situation."
Oy, where to begin?
As Karina Longworth alludes in her own piece today, there've actually been four Variety articles about the THINKFilm situation (May 12, May 14, May 29 and June 1), the last of which notes that another lawsuit had been filed against the company by Mammoth Advertising. This would seem to cut to the heart of Roston's complaint - hell, if Variety thinks the story merits FOUR articles, maybe there is some truth to it!
But really, the fact that there haven't been "hard news stories" about THINK's situation is a reason to doubt what's been said on those awful blogs? Strange notion that, considering that everything that we reported in our "controverisial" "BREAKING" story was backed up less than 24 hours later by Variety.
As for Roston's contention that we didn't even seek comment from THINK, I think several points are worth noting. First, as we've mentioned previously, we've had an off-the-record email exchange with Mark Urman. I have given him on-the-record questions about the state of THINK's financial affairs but have yet to receive a reply. I should also note that more than once I have been given information about THINK that I have felt was either gossip or unverifiable and have not run that information. Finally, one should note that in Variety's most recent story, requests for comment from THINK are referred to a PR company, which gave no comment. Even Roston himself can't get anything out of Urman on this point, as Urman's comment starts off with "Let's not get into the whole THINK thing."
But finally, Tom, if you're gonna criticize me and put ironic quotations around the idea that I've done "reporting" on this topic, then you should name me and link to the posts in question.
Whoa, before we get into an East Coast-West Coast doc-lovers’ feud (I guess you’d get to be Tupac), let me just say I was way too flip, as well as, well, a bit inaccurate (correction on the number of Variety pieces duly noted). But my post was not directed at you. (You’re not the only one who has posted about ThinkFilm’s problems.) I was really addressing a larger blogosphere issue, which, yes, I’d like to playfully refer to as the blog-media-complex, and how feeding frenzies of half-truths can become wholes. Plus, I wanted to give Think’s Mark Urman a platform to address the topic.
That all said, maybe the specific case in question (ThinkFilm) isn’t quite the right one to plant my flag on. They clearly are having troubles, as you’ve noted here. I just get annoyed at how information sometimes gets processed on the Internet.
Peace,
Tom
Posted by: Tom | June 12, 2008 at 09:35 AM