The reason I stopped being a TV critic \u2013 well, it\u2019s because I got kicked out of Radio Times. But there was also the very big pull that I wanted to make drama rather than analyse other people\u2019s. And unfortunately there was also the pretty big push that I was getting ever more unhappy with how reviews and reviewers worked.<\/p>\n
When you write for one magazine you obviously read all of them and this was my thing, this is what I enjoyed, this was drama, so I read them all with gusto. Except I\u2019d keep reading a competitor\u2019s review of a show and realise that out of the two of us, only I had actually watched the drama. <\/p>\n
Then, too, in researching various books and looking back across archives, I would see that some reviewers were writing at best what they thought the reader wanted to have and at worst what the drama producers insisted. The same reviewer would praise a series to the heavens and then next year in the archive he or she would be praising the show\u2019s second series by saying how much better it was than the rubbish first one.<\/p>\n
You get the idea. I got kicked out for unrelated crimes (aka budget cuts) and reviewing is one thing I\u2019ve not looked back at once. Except that it has tickled me how over the last couple of years I\u2019ve done a great deal of reviewing of software. <\/p>\n
And I love it. There is some tremendous work being done in software and the tools I\u2019ve relished the most have become part of my daily work. I wouldn\u2019t be producing what I\u2019m producing if it weren\u2019t for this stuff.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve just not seen this enjoyment of reviewing as being incompatible with my previous fretting. An app says it is for X and that it does Y. You use it and find out. I\u2019m not saying it\u2019s easy but the nuances of drama aren\u2019t there: I do think about why I like and enjoy one app over another and that\u2019s important. It\u2019s also as indefinable as reviewing drama: if you can explain to me why I enjoy writing in an app called Drafts and I don\u2019t enjoy writing in Word, well, I\u2019ll be grateful.<\/p>\n
But someone else\u2019s review came out this week of a particular piece of software and between that reviewer and me, I am honestly wondering whether only I actually launched the app.<\/p>\n
I won\u2019t name the app or the reviewer for a combination of reasons from how this is about the overall issue instead of one specific case, and also because of legality. <\/p>\n
But I filed my review the other day and before it came out, there was this other website covering this same thing. I read it to see if I\u2019d missed anything, I read it from curiosity. This other reviewer gives this app four stars. Understand this: it\u2019s not an issue of opinion, this thing factually does not do what it says. <\/p>\n
Nothing in this is opinion, it\u2019s straight reporting so you report it. Or I did, anyway.<\/p>\n
This particular software is free and these days no software is expensive but your time is valuable to me. I wouldn\u2019t recommend an hour-long episode of a show if I didn\u2019t mean it; equally I won\u2019t recommend a tool that will take you a time to discover it doesn\u2019t do what it claims. Or rather that maybe yes, strictly speaking, it’s possible to get a feature to do a thing if you’re of an engineering persuasion and aren’t actually trying to use it to do something. Oh, that’s why I don’t like Word.<\/p>\n
I know I sound like I think I\u2019m a paragon here and I can remember reviews where I\u2019ve been wrong or later changed my mind so radically that I was effectively wrong. But reviewers have one job and one advantage: they\u2019ve used the software or they\u2019ve watched the show before you. <\/p>\n
We can\u2019t tell you not to buy or not to watch but we can give you our opinion and present a case for you to judge. And I say ‘we’ there because this is more than about one review. Maybe that four-star reviewer is a very technical German speaker and the bugs I found were peculiar to my Mac. I don’t mind stopping reading a site or a magazine because I’ve found that the reviews just aren’t for me, but when you stop because you can’t trust them, that makes me doubt all reviews.<\/p>\n
There’s a big element here that as a reviewer I might think my reviewing is a small thing yet I don’t like it being undermined or not taken seriously. There’s a big element here that I use an awful lot of software and I have relied on reviews to help me find the tools I need. <\/p>\n
So if I’m a paragon, I’m an unhappy one. Besides, I can\u2019t claim to be virtuous because I also used four stars in my review of this app, although only to cover up an unpublishable word.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The reason I stopped being a TV critic \u2013 well, it\u2019s because I got kicked out of Radio Times. But … Continue reading