You know, I'm not gonna read through the whole thing but from what I've gathered the big "controversy" is the CEO is kind of a dick and the whole thing is really not that far away from any other common workplace drama.
So the recent controversy about Channel Awesome mismanagement
- Thread starter Drathnoxis
- Start date
It?s disappointing they ended like this. I loved Nostalgia Critic/Chick and Atop the Fourth Wall. Oh well, to all things there is a season and all that.
Have they actually cancalled the Nostalgia critic? They're bleeding subs right now, but I don't think Doug is hanging up his hat. Hes too egotistical to give upGordon_4 said:
Use several hours of your spare time to acquire extra $1000 on your paypal account each week... Get more details on following site>>>
.......... http://Help80.com
.......... http://Help80.com
I seem to remember rumors that Michaud was worthless as a CEO have been flying around on the down-low for years ever since Bhargo (the Ma-Ti guy) left.evilthecat said:
Dena Natali listed both of these points as reasons why she left CA last year. Right hand didn't know what the fuck the left hand was doing, and she'd pretty much had enough.
TJ Kirk harped on this hard in his little expose video over why he quit CA 6 years ago. He even said then that instead of promoting new talent on the site Michaud and Ellis were only interested in the Doug Walker Show and maybe a handful of others.
It's like the writing was on the walls for years if you knew where to look.
Much like the Escapist, it's interesting seeing the shelf-life of these websites, and how they don't simply fold up like a normal business might after reaching old age. The need for video hub websites, like CA and Escapist, was removed the moment youtube and patreon became popular, but because they are run by a few creatives who still have some form of output (and this output isn't terribly expensive to produce), they feel the need to keep going forever.
I think hub websites need to have a better way to admit they can no longer continue at the same pace. They need to have a site redesign pre-funded in the pipeline so that they can simplify the website back to something cheaper, more basic, and more able to focus on the remaining output. The Escapist might as well just switch to being the Yahtzee show, or maybe even a pure forum with all theother news feeds and front page removed.
I think hub websites need to have a better way to admit they can no longer continue at the same pace. They need to have a site redesign pre-funded in the pipeline so that they can simplify the website back to something cheaper, more basic, and more able to focus on the remaining output. The Escapist might as well just switch to being the Yahtzee show, or maybe even a pure forum with all theother news feeds and front page removed.
Youtube has so many management issues (#WTFU) that it is legitimately easier to have your own web presence, especially if you're super popular. I watch NC and Tamara's Never Seen on Youtube just because the CA layout is a navigational cluster-f. I watch Linkara on his website, and I watch everyone else on their own Youtube channels. I've really been into La'Ron Readus lately.maninahat said:
I think this misses the point about the HORRENDOUS MISMANAGEMENT that both these sites have been subject to. The Escapist has been very poorly run for many years, and made a great deal of mistakes in handling and promoting the majority of their content. Especially moving Zero Punctuation to Youtube with zero back promotion to their main site. I could go on at length about this issue, but I've already done so quite a few times so I'll just link to that here.maninahat said:
Correction:Rain Gass said:
Spoony has had "health issues" that have been preventing him from doing his normal stuff for a long, long, long, long, long time now. (But not from accepting money for it)
Well, like a lot of mental health issues, bipolar disorder can be quite "productive" in certain ways. If your job is getting angry and weirdly intense about geek culture on the internet, it's not necessarily going to be an impediment provided you only write and perform in manic phase, which Spoony clearly did.Drathnoxis said:
I think it's a misnomer that everyone who has mental health issues is always miserable and worthless and always comes off as depressed or delusional. The intensity, emotion and spontaneity that borderline or bipolar people exhibit, for example, can make them living nightmares to be around on a bad day, but it can also make them fun and hyper-productive on a good day. I was never a massive fan of Spoony's content, but I can definitely see why people were and why he fitted in so well in the whole online media commentary environment of the time where everything was based on being cartoonishly over the top and angry.
None of this is to play down that he was clearly a nightmare to work with, and the signs were definately there if anyone had bothered to look, but the deterioration has been.. extremely noticeable.
Well Channel Awesome posted... not an apology, but this [http://channelawesome.com/our-response/]. Yikes.
Doing a flippant point-by-point rebuttal ala forum banter is about the worst strat they could've gone for.
Doing a flippant point-by-point rebuttal ala forum banter is about the worst strat they could've gone for.
I don't agree that it's the worst. They're in an odd spot considering the accusations are bundled in a 73 page document. I don't think a generic "we're really sorry about what happened, we were new to it all, we deeply apologize and hope to make amends in the future" would really help considering people have accused them of some illegal/harmful stuff.Johnny Novgorod said:
Granted the presentation is really poor. But at the same time so is the google document, it's absolutely riddled with unnecessary shit.There are accusations, if proven true, absolutely damning; but the message gets muddled because there's so much irrelevant stuff in there.
In the end it boils down to how much of this will people actually read? Odds are most people interested in the story didn't read the entire document or the entire response. Instead they read a page or two, read a few tweets, and just formed an opinion. Having read both entirely, although presented poorly I do think that it does to some way (not entirely) discredit some heinous accusations in the google doc. Having chat logs instead of just "he said, she said" accusations goes a long way.
Don't get me wrong I fully believe that the company and everything about it was a shit show, but some of the google doc tries to paint a lot of the stuff as malicious, where I think a lot of this stuff was sheer incompetence.
Honestly, I don't think there is a way that they could have gotten out of this. The public has made up it's mind and there is no changing it, no matter how much evidence there is or is not against the allegations or how much they apologize. I mean, these are still only allegations, that document doesn't have much evidence apart from testimonials. So if they did apologize and say "we're sorry for everything! We apologize from the very depths of our soul for all that's happened!" that's just admitting that it's all true. It won't even matter because people will just say "you're apologizing now? Too little, too late." There's no way out. They've already been sentenced in the court of public opinion, and in these courts there's no appeal.
I don't think their chat logs make them look that bad either. That one with Lindsay 'seems' as if they are as giving her the final say on the scene she has a problem with and she says whichever way is fine with her. It is only partial context though.
I think this line is particularly funny in light of current events:
Not saying they are innocent though, that contract does look just as cruddy as the doc stated.
I don't think their chat logs make them look that bad either. That one with Lindsay 'seems' as if they are as giving her the final say on the scene she has a problem with and she says whichever way is fine with her. It is only partial context though.
I think this line is particularly funny in light of current events:
Not saying they are innocent though, that contract does look just as cruddy as the doc stated.
That's the problem isn't it? They're stooping to the base level of an irritated forum user, nitpicking through accusations that are themselves, in many instances, nitpicks. It's unprofessional, unbecoming and a PR fiasco in general. The fact that they're only tackling a choice portion of the accusations and that they're dignifying them with screenshots is embarrassing, it makes it look like they don't know what to do with all the other accusations and that we can't trust their word as much as physical evidence. "Worst ever" may be hyperbole; even so they're doing none of the things they should be doing in an effort to contain the situation.Rednog said:
I'm coming from a PR perspective, I don't care for the channel nor is my blood boiling over the workplace drama. But it strikes how awfully they're following the accusations. A simple if disingenuous apology would've immediately halved the outrage.
So two thing I want to address.Major Tom said:
1) I'm genuinely curious what else in the google doc they should've addressed?
2) The one thing you did point out, the compensation of film crossovers. I kind of understand where they were coming from, and I kind of got this view from listening to the "Down the Rabbit Hole" livestream of the google doc, the anniversaries were a money pit. It looks like they were trying to recoup costs, and they did it in a hamfisted manner. In all honestly they probably should've just never done the anniversaries after they realized that it wasn't profitable.