Your points are also well taken, and I emphatically do look forward to seeing how Bleeding Cool shapes up.

I have no interest in the parts of the paper that talk about celebrities, movie casting, and the like, and certainly wouldn’t mind seeing those sections vanish, and I similarly don’t care about them in blogs and Internet news sites, so I’m happy to see that Bleeding Cool will allow me to more easily filter out that stuff.

As for Snopes, yes it confirms as well as debunks urban legends, but each entry is framed around doing one or the other, rather than “Here it is, what do you think?” which many of the red lights and swipe files seem to be saying. That’s Fox News stuff.

So, I’ll keep reading, keep commenting and feet-fire-holding, and keep looking forward to the investigative journalism that I expect from you. Good luck with Bleeding Cool—I’m glad to see that you’ve found a way to make a day job of it.

One nice things is that BC is now my day job. I used to send half an hour a day. Now I’m spending 6-7 hours. That’s got to help.

Snopes also confirms urban legends as well. And you know what? I think the Swipe File is labelled as well these days as Snopes is.

I do take your points, and I keep trying to do better. I hope you continue to enjoy BleedingCool – and hold my feet to the fire when I bugger up. Which I will.

I also hope that separating things out will help, as my main concern was these things running in one column. As you note, newspapers run a wide variety of material, but I made as one of my original points the fact that reporting on things like film business and film stars take place in separate sections of the paper.

On plot points in the column, I just fail to see their place in the same column as actual news. (And I wouldn’t include casting choices as plot points.) Similarly, I wouldn’t have a problem with self plugs running at the end of the column, in the byline, or on a separate page, but I think that in “Lying in the Gutters,” they were listed among the items within in the column, with a green stoplight and everything. Transparent, yes, but still unseemly.

As for those red lights, I get that they mean “this probably isn’t true,” but they seemed to often run without any sort of debunking, and they were almost always the first place I saw rumors, whether or not they turned out to be false. It’s a fine line between reporting on a rumor and being the one that makes the rumor go viral. Also, Snopes’s entire purpose is the debunking of urban legends. It says right at the top that false stories are false, and the purpose of the article following is to explain why they’re untrue and attempt to explain where they came from, not simply to report that the legend exists.

On the swipe file, I don’t know what to tell you. Your title comes from a pretty Inside Baseball definition of “swipe” and the majority of readers could certainly be forgiven for being unfamiliar with it. As Rebecca Pidgeon says in “State and Main” when Philip Seymour Hoffman asks, “How do I make a movie called ‘The Old Mill’ when I don’t have an old mill?”: “Well, first you gotta change the title.”

Accountability: See, I don’t know. Saying “I was only reporting on a rumor, even though I was the only one reporting on it and most people probably wouldn’t have heard it otherwise” just doesn’t seem to fit a normal journalistic definition of accountability. And I certainly know, based on many of the important stories you’ve broken, and my own limited knowledge of some stories that never saw publication because you did due diligence and didn’t run with them after getting evidence to the contrary, that you quite often have journalistic motives and quite often let those motives lead you to behave in a way that I’d consider more ethically sound than the cheerleading of most of the comics press.

I like Heidi’s blog, too, but I do think “Lying in the Gutters” was alone in containing all the things it did in one column, many of which I’m glad were there. Consumers and industry pros should know a lot of the things that only you were reporting, and I definitely want to make it clear that I applaud that aspect of your work. I’m glad the investigative journalism will continue to have a home, and even more glad that it’s now easier read it while skipping the sections that don’t interest me or strike me as ethically dubious.

Is it okay if I take you up on a couple of things? (Yes.) Thank you. (My pleasure.)

“Unfortunately, “Lying in the Gutters” combined this work with many, many stories that bring serious question to Johnston’s ethics, such as the notion that revealing upcoming plot points in comics series constituted news”

You know I tried to stay away from this, whiting out stuff if necessary, but this was very rare. But journalists in mainstream press write spoiler stories for all sorts of TV shows and films. And it does seem to constitute news. I cite the casting of Matt Smith as The Doctor.

It’s true I tried to keep LITG as a wide reaching column. But you don’t castigate a newspaper for running entertainment news, a gossip column, feaurtures and interviews AS WELL as hard hitting pieces of investigative journalism. My favourite example of the latter is a British magazine called Private Eye, but it also runs Onion-style stories, parodies and cartoons. I really think something can do all these.

“that Johnston’s own comics projects should be plugged not at the end of the column or in his byline, but as stories within the column itself”

Yeah I did that. It wasn’t like I was hiding it though, like the way the Murdoch press plugs its other enterprises. I hope I was blatant.

“his frequent backpeddling on the implications of his reports (including his recent claim on The V that his recurring “Swipe File” feature is not meant to imply that one image included is “swiped” from the other)”

It isn’t, it’s meant to suggest a similarity and ask the viewer to make a judgement. Sometimes they are blatant swipes, sometimes coincidences, sometimes a bizarre mismatch of images. “Swipe File” is an advertising term, that’s where the Journal got it from, and I’m basically continuing that feature (and that of Swipe Of The Week – which also published homages and coincidences). I recently ran a poll to see if its name should be changed and a large majority voted to keep it. This is not backpedalling. This is original intent.

“and his use of the “traffic light” ranking system in “Lying in the Gutters.” A disclaimer told readers that stories running with a red light were probably not true, which begs the question: why did they run anyway?”

Because they were rumours runninga round the industry and I was reporting on them. This feels like asking Snopes why they are running a piece on an email meme saying it’s not true. LITG reported on rumours, and considered their “truthiness” (thank you Stephen.)

“This is part of a pattern of avoiding accountability for the accuracy of the stories “Lying in the Gutters” ran.”

I really don’t believe I did avoid that. I believed I faced up to it.

“This is not to single out “Lying in the Gutters”—except that, well, actually it is, but not through any fault of Johnston’s. He’s alone out there,”

I’m not you know. Heidi MacDonald is MY favourite comics gossip columnist.

“meaning that the things he gets right are important, but the things he does wrong are just as important.”

I agree wholeheartedly. But I don’t think I avoided those.

“When the premiere comics gossip column is also the only real comics journalism, it becomes difficult to separate the two and the otherwise off-base question”

Hopefully Bleeding Cool, by dint of seperating pieces into their own sections, might help solve that.