Unless you live in a cave, you know that this year's Locus magazine award was fraught with controversy. This weekend I was reading down through SF Signal's blog and saw "Locus Award problems" What? More? This has got to be the 800 lb soap opera of a summer for Locus magazine. With that thought in mind, drawn I was, like moth to flame, to the SF Signal suggested, Visions of Paradise blog for a run on comment concerning just what went horribly wrong with the award this year. If you're not clear as to what happened, the editor of Visions of Paradise put it this way:
But Locus made the mistake of opening the voting to anybody who visits the Locus Online website, rather than restricting it to readers of the magazine. So this year the number of voters of the Locus Award who were not readers of the magazine apparently skewed some of the results away from the recommended stories pushed in the pages of the magazine. So as to minimize such free-thinking influence on the awards, the editors of Locus decided after the voting was completed to count the votes of Locus subscribers as double the value of non-subscribers.
As we know now, Cory Doctorow was a run away favorite in the voting, which either the person or the fact that non readers far outvoted readers of Locus, did not sit well with the editorial staff, so as you can see, they skewed the ranking until they got a result they were comfortable with.
Last thing I am going to say about this....its their award, in house I think they can and should do as they please, but on the flip side, when you open it to the public...don't piss on our heads and tell us it's raining.
But Locus made the mistake of opening the voting to anybody who visits the Locus Online website, rather than restricting it to readers of the magazine. So this year the number of voters of the Locus Award who were not readers of the magazine apparently skewed some of the results away from the recommended stories pushed in the pages of the magazine. So as to minimize such free-thinking influence on the awards, the editors of Locus decided after the voting was completed to count the votes of Locus subscribers as double the value of non-subscribers.
As we know now, Cory Doctorow was a run away favorite in the voting, which either the person or the fact that non readers far outvoted readers of Locus, did not sit well with the editorial staff, so as you can see, they skewed the ranking until they got a result they were comfortable with.
Last thing I am going to say about this....its their award, in house I think they can and should do as they please, but on the flip side, when you open it to the public...don't piss on our heads and tell us it's raining.
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