Some notes on Dr Disrespect and 'Now they tell us'

I find this type of comment kind of annoying. I had a whole cute little section that broke up the piece about how beaten up Slasher was over the Doc story! Besides being a journalism process snob, the stuff I really care about when I write are little anecdotes like that one. I’d trade the rest of the Doc article for the little shard of “Rod was depressed.” (Granted, it was stylistically pretty plain. I was writing quickly.)

I also think people who write that sort of comment tend to be at war with an idea of an article they made up in their head, and not the actual thing. The piece was not an investigative report. It was, narrowly, a round-up of the news of the previous 12 hours plus some analysis of the rules and rites of journalism. It came together in just a few hours.³ Elsewhere on Twitter, I saw somebody characterize my piece as “Journalism 102.” The person meant it as an insult — but they were also kind of right! Not that many people really get the monastic-professional traditions of journalism, least of all in the video game, streaming and esports worlds.

(Side note: I’ve thought about writing a “How To Read Articles” entry titled something like “There are different kinds of articles,” listing out the differences between op-eds, reported opinion, investigative reports, news, etc. I’m not sure how to write it in a way that is not too patronizing, though.)

I’m going to excerpt my former colleague Riley MacLeod at length here, because I think he absolutely nailed the dynamic in his write-up in Aftermath. Apologies to Riley for putting three paragraphs he wrote behind my paywall.

“If you’re a journalist,” he wrote, “this all makes sense to you: you know what goes into a story being publishable, and you’ve probably had stories yourself that, for one reason or another, couldn’t clear that bar. But if you’re not a journalist, these ‘open secret’ vibes might hit differently.”

“I don’t know that I’d expect your average person, who reads games news and followed the Disrespect story but otherwise lives a life outside the news cycle, to look at all these people who seemed to be silently familiar with the rumor and say, ‘yeah, seems fair.’”

“I think these feelings are — at their deepest core if not their surface — fair, because journalism is fucking weird,” he added. “It plays by standards very different than those you employ in your everyday life when telling other people about things.”

I worried a tiny bit that I added to the confusion on Twitter by promoting the article with a tweet that included the phrase “Journalists have only ever known a rumor. They want to know the truth.” I’m not sure that “rumor” was the best word to use in that situation. Material gathered in the course of reporting isn’t really a rumor, certainly not to a journalist. But it’s also not a fact until it’s on the page (which means it’s been vetted and confirmed and is reliable enough to produce for the public).

This, of course, may seem like crazy talk to a normal person. “Not a fact until it’s on the page?” Huh? As Riley put it, that’s just not the standard by which most people share information with one another in their day to day life. But the fact that what reporters heard four years ago about Doc ended up being true doesn’t mean that in the intervening years journalists knew it was true. They didn’t!

Now, briefly, I want to talk about two totally opposite responses to “POV your Valorant esports team is falling apart.”

On social media, people seemed to think they had identified the team I was writing about. On Reddit especially, one theory stood out among a handful of options floated by commenters. I’m not naming the team Reddit landed on, mostly because I don’t want to invoke the name of any team in the context of that story. The identity wasn’t really the point.

What was so funny to me about the community’s certainty, however, was that Valorant coaches — who you might expect to know a lot about the inner workings of teams and the work ethics and habits of individual players — had the exact opposite reaction.

After that story went live, I heard privately from multiple coaches across tiers 1 and 2 whose reactions were (and I’m paraphrasing):

• “Hey, was this about my team?”

• “You would have reached out to me personally if you were writing about my team, right?” (The answer, for what it’s worth, is yes).

• “I’ve worked with a dozen players who resembled [random character] from the article.”

I found that funny!

Alright, I think that’s all I’ve got. Thanks for reading! If you have thoughts on anything in this piece, just respond to this email or in our Discord channel!

Cheers, Mikhail

1. For now, the story seems more or less settled(?) outside of the question of how folks will respond when the streamer returns from his “vacation.” The answer, freakishly, is that a lot of people seem totally ok with his behavior, and/or view it as grounds on which to advance their side’s position in the culture war, the lines of which mostly seem drawn around “Will the tweet I’m writing now piss off people I don’t like?”

2. Another, shorter version of my response.

3. An aside: The Doc story is the first newsletter I’ve published since leaving Substack where the net subscriber count after publication was positive. Just about every time I post, I lose subscribers.
   

   In the context of my other metrics, it’s an anomaly. Every esports-related edition of the newsletter has had more readers than the last thanks to devoted readers on Reddit, and most of the current-events-y analysis pieces have found their audiences on Twitter. All of the metrics are good and point up — except for subscriber count.
   

   There are a few reasons I can think of for this. The most obvious one is that I don’t publish frequently enough to grow the subscriber base. This is a major problem of mine and something I’m working on. It’s one of the reasons I grabbed hold of the Doc news and immediately wrote about it.
   

   But also, counterintuitively, I don’t publish frequently enough to cull certain subscribers. Substack’s networking features were a boon for my subscriber count, but I also think it attracted fake email addresses and accidentally drew in people who did not really know what they were subscribing to. On Substack, any churn that arises from the networking feature is renewed by the networking feature. Not so off-platform.
   

   Anyway: Every writer I know has seen a situation in which the project they labored over got no love, and the thing that took them 6 hours got the most attention they’ve ever seen. The response to the Doc story is my version of that.