Cheryl Morgan, Dave McCarty Resign from WSFS’ Hugo Award Marketing Committee

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WSFS’ Hugo Awards Marketing Committee (“HAMC”) members Cheryl Morgan and chair Dave McCarty have resigned. New chair Linda Deneroff says, “We are currently in a holding pattern. I have taken over leading the HAMC, but I still need to contact the other members of the committee to see if they wish to remain on it.”

The Hugo Awards Marketing Committee (“HAMC”) members listed in its report to the 2023 Chengdu Worldcon were Dave McCarty (Chair), Linda Deneroff, Craig Miller, Cheryl Morgan, Mark Olson, Kevin Standlee, and Jo Van Ekeren.

File 770 learned about the changes after inquiring whether there had been any turnover in the HAMC despite there being no public announcement like the one made by WSFS’ Mark Protection Committee (see “Worldcon Intellectual Property Announces Censure of McCarty, Chen Shi and Yalow; McCarty Resigns; Eastlake Succeeds Standlee as Chair of B.O.D.”.)

Update 02/19/2024: Cheryl Morgan has posted a statement about her resignation from the HAMC:

Public Statement re the Hugos

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75 thoughts on “Cheryl Morgan, Dave McCarty Resign from WSFS’ Hugo Award Marketing Committee”

  1. Pingback: The 2023 Hugo Nomination Scandal Gets Worse | Cora Buhlert

  4. John S / ErsatzCulture: The same Mark Olson (aka mlo) that posted a – quickly reverted, after I posted about it on social media – edit to Fancyclopedia

    Wow, I had not seen that. That is so incredibly inappropriate, and its reversion was necessary. Sadly, my estimation of Olson’s character has been revised markedly downward.

    Thanks for calling attention to that, John.

  6. I haven’t had my morning coffee yet. Wow.

    … So wait, this happened some time ago but the only reason we know about it is that File 770 asked?

    Oof. Wanders off in search of coffee.

  7. I’m the one who reverted Mark’s article. I count him as an old friend but think his judgment was seriously off in that case. At Boskone I talked with him about it; he wasn’t upset with me but said he may post a revised version of it in the future.

    Dave McCarty has finally done something honorable.

  9. Pingback: AMAZING NEWS FROM FANDOM: February 18, 2024 - Amazing Stories

  11. I’m appalled by Mark Olson’s Fancyclopaedia update, although sadly not surprised. Partly because it’s terrible for an HAMC person to do this, but also because anything purporting to be a source of factual information should not become a soapbox for someone’s personal views, especially when they do not necessarily reflect the majority (or even the reality, given that the Hugos consistently attract more voters and interest than they used to).

  12. Mark Olson’s screed is particularly annoying to me as someone who started participating in Hugo voting a decade ago…but 4 years after Olson considers them dead.

  13. Someone who thinks it was an “ill-considered decision” to attract more voters is a member of the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee?

  15. Sponsors are going to be key going forward, since things aren’t going to be getting cheaper. The important thing is transparency.

    Also, Ben needs to resign from the MPC, or they need to vote him off. It’s clear that he’s representing whatever business interests of whatever the Chengdu WorldCon has morphed into, and allowing him to stay on the MPC is dangerous to the entire community.

  18. “The problems seem to be from Boston fandom. What’s going on there?”

    I live there, and I wish I knew.

    I go to the cons, but I have no interest in socializing with the con runners. Over the last decade there’s been one drama after another in Boston cons, and I’m really tired of it.

  19. The problems seem to be from Boston fandom. What’s going on there?

    We’re obnoxious and disliked, that cannot be denied.

  21. Last decade?
    You must be new to the area. 🙂

    Arisia was born out of Boskone in the late 1980s; Readercon went thru its own dramatic changes around 2010…

    Drama? You’re soaking in it

  22. The Olsons used to be a major force in Boston-area fandom. Used to be. Mark dropped NESFA like a hot potato years ago, well over a decade, I think, when he didn’t get his way over something. Priscilla still participates in some aspects of running Boskone, but a pale shadow of what she used to do.

    Who else is Boston fandom are you thinking of?

    Arisia has had some major issues, I know.

  24. @Lis Riba–Pardon me for pointing out that events four decades ago are hardly current drama.

    Arisia and Readercon have each had recent and serious Code of Conduct issues. And Arisia got sued over respecting a hotel worker picket line, and got whacked hard for doing, in that instance, the right thing. (Noting that they did the right thing on the picket line issue should not be mistaken for a defense of their appalling Code if Conduct issues. I will get cranky if anyone accuses me of defending or excusing various bad actors and bad actions because I note that on the picket line issue, Arisia was in the right.)

  27. The last time I mentioned the Arisia-Boskone split I got flamed (not here). That was less than ten years ago. People here have very long memories.

    But that was a policy dispute about the direction fandom was going – media vs printed. It wasn’t about racism, or sexism. or homophobia, or harassment, or vote fixing …

  28. The Hugo Awards Marketing Committee maintains the websites worldcon.org, thehugoawards.org, and wsfs.org. The committee’s job is technical. They keep the sites running and up to date. They don’t originate the information on the sites.

    My feeling is that if I don’t agree with someone’s opinions, I can take it up with them when I see them at a convention. It is hard enough to find volunteers who will work for years on keeping the websites going. If we insist that all the volunteers must not have strong opinions about anything that goes on in fandom, good luck with that.

    Cheryl Morgan was one of the first people involved in setting up the websites and put in years of work on the committee. Whatever reasons she has for moving on, I think she deserves our thanks and appreciation for her service.

  29. Boskone had some serious turnover in its con committee this year. The absence of a person whom I won’t name (no connection with the Olsons) made me feel comfortable for the first time in years about being on the program, but they really had to scramble to get everything done on time (and succeeded, as far as I could see).

  30. Like any organization with a long history, there are probably too many festering wounds for those of on the periphery to understand what should be happening and what is the result of decade(s)-old grievance(s). A lot of the fallout from Chengdu feels sad and even unnecessary, but I hope it at least reinvigorates fandom rather than just burning it.

  31. I’m not sure why Chen Shi was censured for being Worldcon Chair, given that we’ve seen no evidence that the English-language censorship was known to anybody but the Anglo subset of the committee.

    @Ersatz: My memory is bad. What happened in 2010 (with fandom, not with the world)?

  32. I would be interested in a statement from Cheryl; I’ve always enjoyed her con reports and book reviews.

  33. @Madame Hardy
    My impression is that’s just Mark’s personal opinion on when the Hugos stopped being any good. Also seems like it might coincide with when he stopped having much of a role in Worldcon conrunning.

  34. @Madame Hardy:

    Re. Chen Shi: remember that Barkley and Sanford blanked out a name in the Diane emails. I don’t think it was Chen Shi, but I believe it was one of his close associates. But people should also remember that a load of other stuff went down at Chengdu besides the Hugos, in my opinion much of it far worse. (And before anyone asks me to elaborate on what I’m referring to, it’s all in the daily Chengdu updates in the Pixel Scrolls I did for two months between September and November.)

    Re. 2010 – no idea, I wasn’t in fandom then.

  36. I have no inside information about why 2010 was considered the end date of Hugodom, but in 2011, the best related works finalists were

    Chicks Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It, edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Tara O’Shea (Mad Norwegian)
    Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 1: (1907–1948): Learning Curve, William H. Patterson, Jr. (Tor)
    The Business of Science Fiction: Two Insiders Discuss Writing and Publishing, Mike Resnick and Barry N. Malzberg (McFarland)
    Writing Excuses, Season 4, Brandon Sanderson, Jordan Sanderson, Howard Tayler, Dan Wells
    Bearings: Reviews 1997-2001, Gary K. Wolfe (Beccon)

    with the first listed being the winner. That might have something to do with complaints about newcomers.

  37. I don’t know what Mark might think made 2010 the closing chapter in an era. I do think the 2009 business meeting was its own watershed when Neil Clarke rounded up the support needed to derail Ben Yalow’s effort to get rid of the Semiprozine Hugo.

  38. @John S / ErsatzCulture

    I believe the name blanked out on the emails is the other researcher on the validation spreadsheet. Which I will leave as an excercise for the reader.

  39. I posted this in the wrong thread, so I’m putting it here as well:

    Cheryl was a valuable member of HAMC and was not asked to resign. In fact, I wish she hadn’t.

    Mark has been a member of HAMC for several years, but doesn’t participate. If you check the minutes of the 2022 Worldcon, you will see he is the chair of the Formalization of the Long List Committee (“FOLLE”).

  40. I was apparently blacklisted from participating in Worldcon programming starting in 2014. I have no idea why.

    I have a confirming e-mail about this somewhere in my files.

  41. The events of 2010 were so bad that the Hugo Award Time Erasure & Beverages Committee stepped in, so we can’t remember. If you are wondering why that same committee didn’t act with regard to the events of 2015 that was because of the rule change in 2011 entitled “Stop meddling with the timeline” and the 2012 resolution “Stop using time travel to erase resolutions at the business meeting censuring the Hugo Award Time Erasure & Beverages Committee resolution”. Why the committee has not intervened in the current circumstance was due to them accidentally erasing themselves from history in 2020 in an attempt to shorten the 2020 award ceremony.

  43. My feeling is that if I don’t agree with someone’s opinions, I can take it up with them when I see them at a convention.

    The WSFS is too big for that. There are thousands of members around the world, many who won’t see him at a convention to give their feedback privately on whether he should be editing popular web pages to say the Hugos died in 2010.

    There needs to be a stronger accountability culture in the WSFS. Part of that is having people in positions of leadership who can handle their actions being scrutinized in places like File 770 and respond to concerns in public, instead of keeping it all private in their circle of buddies.

    Linda Deneroff responding to comments in this thread is a great example of what we need.

  44. @Camestros Felaptron – That scenario makes me wonder about the possibilities of a “Red Harvest” variation where two warring organizations in two different alternate futures (cf.”Legion of Time” or “This Is How You Lose the Time War”) cause chaos with their intertemporal conflicts until one person goes to work for one side, then the other, and – though guile, badassery, and a bit of luck – manages to arrange for each faction to erase the other from the time stream.

  46. @Jacob Markov: I remember the “Chicks Dig Time Lords” thing as basically misogyny against younger female fans, as if they were somehow illegitimate and unwanted.

    Feels like increasing diversity in fandom was just beginning to become more visible around then and so was a certain amount of grumpiness about it from some of the old guard.

  48. @PhilRM: Maybe “The Big Time” or one of the other Changewar stories? I’ll have to go back and check. (And it’s definitely not out of the realm of possibility that Leiber wrote something like this first.)

  49. The Hugo Awards Marketing Committee maintains the websites worldcon.org, thehugoawards.org, and wsfs.org. The committee’s job is technical. They keep the sites running and up to date. They don’t originate the information on the sites. – Tom Becker

    This is it exactly. There is also monitoring to ensure that domain name registrations are kept current.

    My own involvement has been mostly with excavating around 20 years of missing Hugo Statistics from the mists of time (mostly old fanzines and Usenet posts), so that they could be posted on TheHugoAwards.org, along with other bits of historical info such as the names of trophy base designers and Hugo Admin committees.

    I am also a member of the Nitpicking & Flyspecking Committee, the purpose of which is to review the minutes of the annual WSFS Business Meeting for spelling, grammar, and content corrections before they are published, and to occasionally craft proposals to present to the Business Meeting for technical tweaks to the language of the Constitution and Standing Rules, for clarity or to update outdated information.

    The members of the Nitpicking & Flyspecking Committee (“NP&FSC”) for 2022-2023 were Don Eastlake (Chair), Jared Dashoff, Linda Deneroff, Tim Illingworth, Jesi Lipp, Kevin Standlee, and myself.

    There is no glamour associated with being a member of the NP&FSC, and the members do the work because they feel it’s needed (not because of the effusive thanks they get for doing it, which they don’t). The reader may draw their own conclusions as to why certain persons may not have found membership in the NP&FSC an attractive prospect.

  50. Peace Is My Middle Name: Yeah, I was an OG who found himself reacting to the title “Chicks Dig Time Lords” with grumpiness, except I decided “Well, maybe I need to get that attitude fixed; what harm is it doing me?”

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