Worldcon 76 Chair Kevin Roche has responded to complaints and criticism of the plan to announce this year’s Hugo finalists at several venues on March 31, like those quoted in the March 27 Pixel Scroll (item #15).
Roche made his statement on the Worldcon 76 website: “From the Chair: regarding the timing of the Hugo Finalist announcement”.
As Chair of Worldcon 76, I would like to express my regret for the distress the timing of our Hugo Finalists announcement has caused for Orthodox Jewish members of our Community. It was not our intention to show disrespect.
When we selected the time and date, it was in keeping with the recent frequent practice of making the announcement simultaneously to fans gathered at events around the world for conventions on Easter weekend (Saturday evening in England, Saturday mid-day in the Western US, and Sunday morning in Australia). My Hugo Awards team believes strongly that as the Hugos are at heart a fan-driven award, announcing the finalists at a time when there can be such simultaneous global presentations is a way to further increase fan awareness of and participation in the awards, ultimately raising its profile in the general population as well.
I am also fully aware of the arguments that Holy Saturday is one of the slowest possible days in the global news cycle, but, in fact, this strategy does appear to be working: Hugo nomination participation overall has been increasing, and this year we actually will have press and local business participation in our additional announcement event taking place in San Jose on March 31st.
We are, in some ways, a victim of our own success; the announcement itself has now become an event that many more people wish to experience, and the wave of buzz and response on social media during and after the announcement is exciting and engaging in its own right.
At this point, I cannot change the announcement timing without undoing months of work by many volunteers to coordinate with all the parties involved (not only the conventions, but the SF-themed restaurant which is hosting the special local event for Bay Area fans, professionals and press). That this timing disenfranchises a part of our community from the immediate celebration grieves me greatly. I hope those affected can find it their hearts to forgive me for the situation. I am truly sorry to have caused you this distress.
My staff who worked on the 2012 and 2015 awards, whose announcement days also coincided with the beginning of Passover, say they do not recall a similar wave of public complaint those years. Perhaps this means the Hugo Awards have now acquired enough public cachet and buzz that a fan-focused announcement event is less necessary. Future Worldcon committees will each choose their announcement dates as they see best; I am sure this year’s situation will inform their decisions.
Finally, let me congratulate in advance all the finalists on the ballot. Being nominated by your fans and peers is the honor of a lifetime, and I hope the joy of being so honored can outweigh the distress caused for some of our community by timing of the announcement.
Kevin Roche
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That seems to me a very handsome apology. I hope future Worldcons will consider this, as he suggests.
Doesn’t seem so handsome to me. I mean, am I expected to believe that it came as a shock to them that people would be upset over the timing?
It’s not as though people haven’t objected to it in the past.
This also strikes me as somewhat questionable:
I expect the puppygate business had as much or more to do with increasing membership than announcing on Easter weekend.
The seven highest votes ever, both for Hugo nominations and for the Hugo final ballot, have been in the last seven years; four of those ballots were announced on Easter Saturday, and one on Easter Monday.
I think this claim’s been made before, but when the data was looked at, the rising trend in memberships predates the Puppies and continues beyond them.
So while they can take credit for causing excitement, and inflating the rise, all indications are that there’d have been a rise anyway.
A nice (occasionally over-the-top) apology, but a few nits to pick and comments to comment.
“further increase fan awareness of and participation in the awards”
Well, it’s kinda preaching to the choir, so I’m a little skeptical it does this. But okay, sure, some folks at those two cons may become aware of it because of that. Those two cons could have panels about the Hugos anyway, of course.
“ultimately raising its profile in the general population as well.”
Announcing at two SFF cons on Easter weekend does that? Any actual proof of this assertion?
“appear to be working: Hugo nomination participation overall has been increasing,”
Confusing correlation and causation? Also, the announcement is when it’s too late to nominate. From all the teeth-gnashing, it sounds like the folks who go to the announcements are folks who already participate in the Hugos. Maybe he’s right that announcing at these two cons this year gets Hugo-ignorant people informed and jazzed up to nominate the next year, but can’t tell from this or other talk about the Hugo finalist announcements.
Even anecdotally – has anyone here (or anyone someone here knows or has heard of reliably) actually first found out about the Hugos or first decided to nominate in the Hugos because of going to one of these finalist announcements at one of these two cons? (One yes is not going to wow me, but I’m curious!)
“whose announcement days also coincided with the beginning of Passover, say they do not recall a similar wave of public complaint those years”
To paraphrase @Daniel Dern: Hmm, why is this Hugo finalist announcement different from these two others, then? People just more willing to speak out these days?
Kendall: Hmm, why is this Hugo finalist announcement different from these two others, then? People just more willing to speak out these days?
I think that is very much part of it; that fans of all sorts of minorities are finally starting to feel more as if they’ll actually be listened to when they talk about the effects of exclusionism in fandom which are invisible to majority members.
I think that another reason the reaction this year was noticeably stronger is because the announcements the last two years had been done within the global media cycle (aha! to use comparable logic, the continued increasing participation must be due to that!), and after that and Scalzi’s post about it, people like me mistakenly thought it meant that Worldcons had finally realized that it was in the Hugos’ best interests to do so.
I would like to see the Hugo Admins every year include 1 optional question on the nominating and voting ballots:
How did you first find out that you had the ability to participate in the Hugo Awards?
1) joined a Worldcon and was informed of it
2) read it in a genre fanzine or newsletter
3) read it on a genre news website or forum
4) found out at Norwescon/Eastercon Hugo announcement
5) heard about it at another convention
6) been doing it so long I don’t remember
7) Other ___________________________
Such data could be very helpful in identifying ways to increase participation, and where promotional efforts might have the most effect.
I think the San Jose guys are caught between a rock and a hard place.
On the one hand they’re being castigated for following a long standing tradition.
On the other hand they’re being castigated for changing a long standing tradition.
It seems to me that increasing numbers of nominations may very well be related to having high profile announcements at major Cons. After all, nominations do not come from the general public who might read about the announcements in the wider press, they come from people who have paid Worldon memberships.
Authors (like Scalzi) might very well like to have the awards publicised more widely to generate sales, but Worldcon admins are presumably trying to drive nominations from their own members up, and to motivate people who might attend or support a con to look into Hugo nominations and supporting memberships.
Niall McAuley: nominations do not come from the general public who might read about the announcements in the wider press, they come from people who have paid Worldon memberships.
And that right there is the problem. If fans who don’t know that they can participate in the Hugos (I once was one of them) don’t read about the announcements in the wider press, they have no reason to buy Worldcon memberships.
A significant number of people who bought Supporting Memberships (or applied to receive one of the 100 free memberships which were available) in 2015 to vote in the Hugos mentioned that they did so only because they found out via the media surrounding the Puppy fiasco that they could do so.
Niall McAuley: Authors (like Scalzi) might very well like to have the awards publicised more widely to generate sales
I recommend that you actually try reading Scalzi’s post before commenting on it. It’s nothing about increasing authors’ sales, and everything about improving the visibility and awareness of, and participation in, the Hugo Awards.
JJ: I happen to think (no formal data) that the 2015 results were at least evenly distributed between new voters learning from mainstream press and fans who were always well aware and decided that they could not sit out the nominations anymore.
(And I tend to believe that it was weighted far more towards re-participating fans than new voters.)
I really enjoyed this recent story by Cory Doctorow, but I’m not sure how well it scales up.
I’ve known about the Hugos in general as long as I can remember…possibly from seeing a display at the library. Pretty sure I first found out about Worldcon supporting memberships and Hugo participation on either GRRM or Scalzi’s blogs. I remember Scalzi organizing the first Hugo Packets (10 years ago!). It was a few years later that I actually did vote. And then puppies were what finally got me to nominate for Sasquan in 2015.
Laura: I’ve known about the Hugos in general as long as I can remember…possibly from seeing a display at the library.
I’d known about the Hugos for decades — and regarded them as an indicator of quality — but I guess I must have thought they were juried. After I got divorced (from a mundane; take a lesson from me on this, kids), I found my way back to SFF fandom. I’d never been to a Worldcon (I’d been to several Star Trek cons and a couple of regional cons many years before), but when I saw that Worldcon was going to be somewhat near to me geographically, I thought “I’d better go to that, or I will always regret not having done so”.
And then when I got the convention notification about Hugo voting, I did a double-take and thought, “Wait, what??? Worldcon members actually get to pick the Hugos???”
And that right there is evidence of an epic marketing fail. Because I’d known for many years what Worldcon was, and what the Hugos were, but I’d never known that the members of one got to pick the other.
Hugos I’ve known since mid 80s. Wasn’t until puppies that I understood I could vote and nominate.
But then I’ve never been much of a con-goer.
Hmm, do mainstream outlets often go into how Hugos are determined at all? Let alone that anyone can buy non-attending con memberships with voting rights.
I learned I could vote in the Hugo Awards in 2007. I knew the award was associated with Worldcon and did some digging on the Internet to see what qualified someone to be a voter. I’ve been one since mailing that first check to become a supporting member of the next con.
I guess I’m older than most of the other posters here. I used to buy Terry Carr’s Best of the Year anthologies every year as soon as they came out. I think that I first learned about fandom, conventions, the Hugo Awards and Hugo voting from Charlie Brown’s Year in SF essays in those Terry Carr books.
@Dennis Howard:
Same here. I learned about all that from Terry Carr’s annual BotY volumes. I actually discovered Locus through reading those essays!
@Laura: Sometimes they mention it, sometimes they get it wrong, sometimes they don’t mention it. Still, more press is good for the awards in general (I feel). And mainstream coverage may lead to someone looking into it even if the mainstream reporting skips over or mangled information. Less mainstream coverage definitely won’t lead to anything of the sort, though.
About publicity and Worldcon now:
http://fancyclopedia.org/it-is-a-proud-and-lonely-thing-to-be-a-fan
Even as late as the 1990s as an actifan myself I ran up against fannish attitudes about not caring what the mundanes thought, let alone appealing to a broader audience.
Yeah, this “people who want the announcement more widely publicised outside big conventions must be those who want book sales” thing implies that the only thing people who don’t already know about the Hugos are good for is buying books, rather than being potential new members of the community who don’t realise what they’re missing out on? As someone who only learned that I could participate in the Hugos (and had a pretty vague concept of them before that) through publicity after the 2015 puppy backlash, I’d LOVE for people like me to have a way to discover this hobby I love that didn’t require the threat of culture war nonsense.
Is “I want other people to discover the things I like” really such a difficult motive to understand?
@Arifel. Not to me.
I think as a field, SFF does better when as a field it moves to “face outward” than to “face inward” but the tendency has been to face inward for a long time.
Because NO WAY people might want to actually go to cons and meet people like them, and might be attracted by there being the announcement of the Hugo nominations?
Because NO WAY visibility might be increased in any other way other than have the announcement on a Tuesday when all the fans are at work so that it can be picked up by E! with the requisite jokes about Spock ears, right?
I think there are some explanations necessary about what people are trying to do and why they are doing it in particular ways.
Firstly our “market research” about what works and what does not is non existent because of our inability too pay for any meaningful study. The little we have suggests that what we are doing now, by announcing at cons, is working better than what was done previously, and that is what people are basically suggesting we return to. See Nicholas Whyte’s comment for a bit more detail.
I personally believe that the pick up of the announcement by traditional media such as TV and newspapers will probably be the same if we announce on Christmas day at the bottom of a coal mine or if we announce in Times Square with marching bands. Those media individually care about SFF or they do not, and they are unlikely to change.
Our major problem is to attract new fans and in particular to attract younger fans. These are primarily involved with Social Media. Currently DragonCon is eating our lunch by having a much stronger social media presence mainly because of their larger number of existing young attendees who are also more active on social media.
The most effective part of announcing at cons is not those who are present themselves but their resulting social media activity creating a much more widely visible event. Part of that is to use the at con event to get them fired up and enthusiastic when they post their own reports.
There are other ways of doing this and I think Helsinki’s use of a video announcement was a good one. I’d like to see this expended with trailers and promotion of the unveiling date and time of the video.
Another successful experiment was done by the Japanese WorldCon who got their publishers to collaborate on a small but effective campaign to promote Science Fiction and the Hugos across Japan.
In general promotion on traditional media costs money that we do not have, even if it is just spent on a dog and pony show for reporters somewhere. We do have a lot of committed and talented people who could potentially make a far greater impact on social media sites, which is where our target ‘market’ gets their information anyway.
I personally like the current at con announcements but perhaps they shouldn’t be used when Passover coincides with Easter. If and when we do something else please let’s attempt something that demonstrates enthusiasm on our part rather than just a press release and a web site.
If we are not noticeably enthusiastic ourselves then it is certain that nobody else will be.
@rochrist —
As others have mentioned, the trend in nominations started well before the pups ever existed.
I made a graph of the rising nominations per year last year, here. You can see that the pups provided a big, but temporary, bump — the trend was steadily upwards both before and after their major push.
@JJ —
I knew about Hugos since I was knee-high to a tardigrade, and knew since many years ago that I could pay $40 and vote. But I’m one of the many who never bothered to actually do it until the pups came along — and that also got me much more active in fringe fandom than I had been (I never have been a trufan, really — never went to a con since college, and so on). So y’all have them to thank for my sparkling presence! ;-D
If someone wrote a recommendation for future Worldcons on what days to avoid for the finalist announcement to respect religious holidays, what specifically would that be? It seems to me that drafting one would be helpful. I’m not religious so I find the whole thing confusing. What days and times related to Easter/Passover/Eid ought to be off-limits, assuming that such concerns were something that a Worldcon desired to address?
If the nominees were announced one category per day over 16 days in the same order the awards ceremony announces the winners, that would shine a longer social media spotlight on the Hugos and might lead to more discussion of nominees on “their” day. It would also build towards the final category nomination reveals.
I guess lost in the wash of the discussion about religious holidays is that many regional cons were held over Easter/Passover because that’s when they could get cheap rates and fans generally were not all that observant. So it made sense to have the Hugo finalists announced that weekend as part of the run up to Worldcon. I don’t recall there being a past flap like this, but maybe there’s a trufan out there who might recall something from forty or fifty years ago…?
Easter weekend is the only weekend where a national UK convention can be held, because it’s the only weekend where hotels are empty and will give you the kind of rates UK cons can afford. At least a UK con I know was cancelled because the hotel fees were not nailed down sufficiently by inexperienced organisers.
The choice is not between a UK national convention during Passover and a convention at some other date: it’s between a UK national con and none.
Kendall on March 28, 2018 at 11:48 pm said:
“Preaching to the choir,” as you put it, is in my opinion far more likely to get likely participants. You may be unaware of it, but the participation was quite low at one point before we started specifically trying to increase exposure and interest. The existing members, and people who attend SF/F conventions, are much more likely to actually get involved than random people, wouldn’t you think? I think it’s more worthwhile trying to get our current members to participate. We still have a long way to go yet. Even with the recent increase in interest, only about 20-30% of the eligible members have been nominating, for example. That leaves a lot of room for improvement among our own core audience.
I do think that if you want to get more people to go to your convention, it is a smart thing to build enthusiasm among those who already go to conventions. That there are several conventions at about the time the Hugos are ready to be announced makes them a good target for the unveiling.
@Contrarius
One thing that’s probably helped some with participation in the final vote is the existence of the Hugo Packet since 2008. And then maybe they nominate the next year.
@Contrarius & others,
I recall the early/mid 2000s where the Hugo numbers were moribund/declining too.
http://www.renosf.org/hugo/images/announcement_slide_2.jpg
I remember a lot of talk going on to try and get more people involved on Livejournal. The Hugo packet made a significant difference but there were efforts by many, including at a grassroots level. It was slow but it looked like it was making a difference with increased numbers. Then Sad/Rabid Puppy happened…
Anna Feruglio Del Dan:
That’s an argument for why a con might want to host an announcement for a popular award. It’s irrelevant to the issue of publicising the Hugos – because the people who would be drawn to a con specifically for the announcement would, by definition, already know enough about the award for that to be a draw.
Also, AS YOU PROBABLY KNOW, not everyone has access to cons, for financial and geographical reasons. This argument is also just as susceptible to the “people who say this just want money from con ticket sales!” cynicism as the argument to do it at a more media-friendly time – although I don’t think this is anyone’s actual motivation.
Well, I didn’t learn about the Hugos via condescending articles on E!, and AS YOU PROBABLY KNOW there’s a wide variety of media outlets out there, including many which covers nerd culture that’s adjacent and sympathetic to SFF literature but isn’t their main focus. Also, I’m sorry that your working environment and schedule seems to be such that you apparently can’t access news during the week, but the evidence from people who have actual experience in the industry (e.g. the Scalzi post linked above) is that weekdays ARE the peak time for disseminating things like this, so I’m not sure why you keep repeating “but I’m at work on Tuesdays!” like its something nobody else has ever considered…
Martin Easterbrook: Currently DragonCon is eating our lunch
Sorry, no. Many of the things you say in your post make sense, but this one is way out there. While I am sure that there is overlap between the attendees of Worldcon and the attendees of DragonCon, they are two very different experiences, and are not in competition with each other.
DragonCon is a massive media con with huge emphasis on cosplay and expensive paid 30-second photo ops with celebrities, and Worldcon is a small, intimate con with emphasis on books, and opportunities for free autographs, photos, and conversations with authors, artists, and editors. Worldcon is not going to appeal to most of the people who go to DragonCon — and, to a great extent I suspect, vice-versa.
I think that’s the first time I’ve seen a convention with 4000-6000 (or more) attendees described as “intimate”. I would also debate “with an emphasis on books” — ISTM there are so many threads no one can be described as central (and consider similar attendance at Hugo Awards and Masquerade — although most costumers don’t claim the Masquerade is the focal point of the convention).
I do know of readers, and sometimes writers, who decided they preferred Dragoncon to Worldcon — but that’s few enough instances to be nothing more than anecdotal. ISTM, however, that Worldcon will never approach Dragoncon’s popularity due to being a convention with a floating site and concom; Martin may be correct that there are fewer social-mediites to fan the flames; most sites could stand significantly more members than they’ve been getting (and would have very modest additional costs).
Contrarius: I made a graph of the rising nominations per year last year
I made a concerted effort to hunt down the numbers using numerous sources; my results are here. The trend really only goes back to Renovation in 2011.
And I don’t know where Renovation got the last 10 years of data in their slideshow chart (they got the earlier years from George Flynn’s spreadsheet), but it’s very blatantly wrong when compared to the actual nominating totals reported by the Hugo Administrators in those years.
Chip Hitchcock: I think that’s the first time I’ve seen a convention with 4000-6000 (or more) attendees described as “intimate”.
To someone who would never consider going to DragonCon because of the cattle-car aspect of the convention, Worldcon is indeed “intimate”.
Worldcon is visiting a town festival. Dragoncon is visiting Disney World. The first is busy, bustling, and crowded, but by comparison? Yeah, intimate doesn’t seem totally insane if that is your standard.
@JJ
When I said DragonCon was eating our lunch I was referring to online Social media presence not to any comparison of the quality or size of the Conventions themselves.I
Martin Easterbrook: When I said DragonCon was eating our lunch I was referring to online Social media presence not to any comparison of the quality or size of the Conventions themselves.
I didn’t read it as a comment on quality or size. I read it as referring to them pulling attendees who might have otherwise decided to go to Worldcon if DragonCon’s media presence wasn’t so much bigger, and I just don’t think that it’s that likely, since the appeal of the two conventions is so very different.
As far as media awareness and promotion of awards, I’d say the Hugos are way out ahead of the Dragons. Of course, we’ll probably never be able to compare how that translates to voter participation.
Laura: As far as media awareness and promotion of awards, I’d say the Hugos are way out ahead of the Dragons. Of course, we’ll probably never be able to compare how that translates to voter participation.
Given the Dragon Awards administrators’ unwillingness to enforce a 1 person-1 vote requirement, and the fact that last year they reported “xxxx nominations and xxxx votes” rather than “xxx nominators and xxx voters“, no, there’s not any meaningful comparison which can be made about participation. And as long as they allow ballot-stuffing, the Dragon Awards are never going to develop a reputation for recognizing excellence. 😐
Speaking of the Dragon Awards (the sf/f ones*) their nomination period appears to have been open for months and I’m pretty sure I never got an email notification.
*They really ought to have googled first, says the Londoner, grumpily.
For the record, I found out about the Hugo system post-Puppy in the run-up to Loncon (although I knew about the Hugo Awards long before that), and got involved with voting and nominating after finding the community here at File770 the year after, but I didn’t find out about it from the mainstream media. I found out about it from online fannish coverage – I think I saw it on Whatever first.
I define “fan” as “people who call themselves fans” – but I draw distinctions between different kinds of fandom. “Transformative works fandom” – “gamer fandom” – “congoing fandom” – etc etc ad infinitum – there are overlaps of course, but each community has its own stuff and its own subculture.
Re: shifts in Hugo nomination rates and personal experience
Back when I first started attending the very occasional Worldcon in the 1980s, I was quite aware that I had the ability to nominate and vote for the awards. What I didn’t have at that time was sufficient knowledge of the material to do so. On the pro side, it wasn’t uncommon that the majority of eligible novels were only available in hardback at the time nominations were due and I wasn’t yet at a financial point where I could buy hardbacks except in very special circumstances. Back then, short fiction was primarily a magazine thing and although I subscribed to various of the SFF magazines, for the most part I wasn’t “into” short fiction. It didn’t do much for me at the time. And on the fannish side of the nominations–I simply wasn’t part of the fanzine culture that they revolved around. So although I knew that I could nominate, I felt divorced from the knowledge bast that would have made it meaningful.
Now? The difference for novels isn’t my ability to afford hardbacks, but rather the availability of ebooks. There isn’t that same built-in delay for reading newly published works if you were watching your pennies. (Yes, I’m omitting the question of library access here, but I haven’t used libraries as a source of fiction reading since high school.) Now I consume a lot more short fiction for several reasons: the availability of multiple formats (especially audio magazines) make it easier to fit into my life, the greater diversity of publications means I’m more able to find sources with a high “like” rate for my tastes and interests, and the internet means I’m more likely to be pointed to stories I’m likely to enjoy as part of a larger conversation. I still tend to have problems brainstorming for the fannish categories, but with the expansion from a focus on fanzine culture (and, yes, I know some people don’t consider that entirely a good thing) there are more likely to be candidates that I encounter on a routine basis.
So, for me, a shift from not being a Hugo nominator to being a regular Hugo nominator wasn’t a matter of knowledge of my ability to do so, but rather larger shifts in the structure of the field that gave me more knowledge of the content that I was nominating from.
@JJ etc: I’m not arguing that Worldcon is comparable to Dragoncon in intensity; for one thing, I’ve never been to Dragoncon, or even discussed it with anyone who has. But consider what else a Worldcon attendee goes to; some will also do large-scale media cons, but ISTM that most of them come out of smaller (sometimes not much, sometimes a lot) fan-run cons; for anyone with that background, Worldcon is not “intimate”.
JJ: “And as long as they allow ballot-stuffing, the Dragon Awards is never going to develop a reputation for recognizing excellence.”
Dragony McDragonface!
#sorry #notsorry
I would ordinarily not go to anything smaller than Worldcon. I get restless even at Worldcon when I do the same loop the fifth time. What helps me is that I know people. Otherwise, I would only visit for 1-2 days at most.
@Contrarius & @JJ: Thanks for the charts and graphs.
/catching up on things I forgot to comment on
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