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Q and A of the Day: Day 1

Posted by Paul | September 01, 2013 at 12:09 AM ET

I have received emails here and there for months now asking what happened to our Q&A With JTA column. The short answer is that I just don't have time. (I'd encourage you to try writing a daily RDR and see how much extra time you'd have left by the way.) Anyway, we are sort of going to bring that back but in a slightly revised way. We will be presenting a Q and A of the Day instead. This column will be published daily, weekly, monthly, or just based on how many questions I get emailed – but no more than one a day. Feel free to send in your questions and I will put them in the queue. We'll see how it goes. Without further adieu, click through for Q and A of the Day: Day 1.

Q. So, I have been thinking. What is the purpose of fan sites in this day and age? This isn't a knock exactly, but it seems like they've become a haven for advertising and not that much content. Granted, the choice for products have become slim with each passing calendar year, but do you think the culture is changing and the need for them might dissipate? Do you think that with Hasbro scaling back on so many things that it may make them eventually obsolete? Social media seems to be taking a big chunk of audience's attention away from the web too. (Frank P.)

A: I am not sure if you're trying to get a rise out of me or if you're just generally speaking and not pointing fingers (*smiles*). I am going to speak from my perspective because I can't speak for anyone else, nor do I want to do that. JTA's purpose on the web is to provide collectors with a resource for Star Wars collecting that's energetic, fun, speculative and engaging. I think the growth in our comments has shown that we do just that.

JTA is not, nor do we strive to become, a "legitimate" media outlet. We have not taken journalism classes, nor do we strive to follow a format akin to the structure and rules of the Associated Press. We love posting articles of store reports and tidbits of news, even if they are speculative in nature. After all, that's what 50% of the hobby is. Our passion over time has given us resources to some incredible breaking news. As you may or may not know, we have developed an audience, despite how "amateur" we are, of Star Wars film actors, sculptors, retail higher-ups, authors, and a better than average sized fan base that has allowed us to reveal or participate in some really cool things. The BAT-AT and the MTT easily come to mind. (Oh, and let's not forget about The Black Series list we recently broke. That was pretty cool wasn't it?) We are thankful and grateful for all of that and that along with are daily posts is all we strive to do. Had we followed "proper protocol", many of those stories would have never come your way. What fun is that?

I periodically skim forums outside of JTA. Without revealing any names, I come across some rather sad posts. People who do work for, or claim to have close ties to, true media oulets or have degrees in journalism try to dig at other sites for the news stories they decide to publish. To me there is nothing worse that a person who does nothing to help the hobby and instead points the finger and bullies others. All they do is wallow around in the forums and offer nothing to help the sites but instead cowardly criticize them. Their posts read like they are miserable geriatrics with every body ailment you could imagine. We're not going to engage that. This is a hobby that is my passion, Chuck's passion and the passion of our other staff. How can the love of the greatest films of all time create an environment in a hobby generated by those films to tear down others? It's easy to let people get under your skin, and once in a while we unfortunately react, but we find that the best "revenge" is to live well. (Thank you Jerry Seinfeld.) And we will indeed live well.

To answer your question, I really don't care what happens in the future. JTA will continue to offer a fun environment for readers, a great interactive community in our comments and provide the best photos and commentary we can of the best Hasbro, Sideshow Collectibles, Gentle Giant Ltd. and other licensee offerings. You'll find that our affiliates listed on our front page will strive to do the same. We will continue to post professionally unprofessional articles (or whatever the miserable critics want to call it) and engage readers to add their thoughts and respond: speculative or hardcore fact. That's our overall philosophy. Those that may choose to criticize seem to not realize that Star Wars fan sites are gnat poop in the grand scheme of things when it comes to media (sorry for the visual). Healthy competition is fun, but why set up conversations in forums that are destructive and attacking to your peers (and fellow collectors who are all in this for the same reasons)? It blows my mind.

JTA may think outside of the traditional media box, but I know that we want to offer something to readers other than the latest online shop news post, publish a Hasbro dump of media images (that everyone else will eventually publish too). And I certainly won't analyze "parrot back" a dry and dull PRESS RELEASE from Hasbro that reveals nothing more than what everyone else knows already! (Yawn!) There is so much more to the hobby than that. As far as social media? I don't know how to say this, but it's an afterthought for us. JTA tries to develop our Facebook and Twitter audience, but I can tell you that all of our fans are organic and real people. We don't buy "likes" from vendors like many other media sites (I am not necessarily talking about fan sites solely here) do. If your Alexa ranking is hanging around the 2 million mark and there are 3K people "talking" about your Facebook page, you can bet that there is a lot of smoke and mirrors going on there. Something is definitely rotten in Denmark. We are commited to our site first and social media second (if that) and if we do or don't grow a strong social media following, so be it. We know it's important in some regards, but we will never forsake our current news and archives online.

Will there be a need for fan sites in the future? I would ask you is there need for them now? We aren't looking to satiate a need of the public. We offer a service and we're thankful for our audience, but we also do this for ourselves. You can take us or leave us, but until we retire you'll find us doing our bread and butter daily stuff as well as our unique Special Reports and other unique stuff to make our site and interesting as possible continually. We have received a lot of great feedback on our "A Digested Look at The Vintage Collection" report and well as our annual "Vintage Versus Modern" reports. So, if you enjoyed those reports, I don't know where else you'd find them except for a Star Wars fan site. Whatever you decide, I hope you'll continue to check out JTA as well as all the other great fan sites out there that offer a plethora of resources for collectors.

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