Feedback on party reports in Hugi#21
After reading the party reports in Hugi#21 I felt like writing some comment about them because many of them (and also some from older issues) were (in my eyes...) not really worth reading.
Adok once wrote a small note about what a party report should look like and I think the ideas mentioned there are not bad at all, hm?
A party report should actually give people who have not been there a feeling whether they missed something or whether the party sucked or just some fun to read. Of course reports are always subjective but many sceners at parties gamble around most of the time and thus experience many different aspects of the whole party happening. That means reports written by those people will be a good mirror of the party itself.
Now I often read party reports like "I arrived on the very last day, realized that there was not much time left for the deadlines and spent all the time hacking my demo."
O.K, this is some detailed information what YOU did at the party but does not give the reader a real piece of the big cake. Of course your own activities are important too, but not only. Apart from that, a party report only dealing with one day does not give the reader any overview. If you write one, then better cover all days.
I also dislike those reports: "As soon as we arrived we caught some beers and went boozing. So we missed all compos except for the multichannel one, but we were too drunk to listen toit."
That's a kind of report which you'd better not write. I don't mind whether you booze at parties or what you do at all, but if you can't even tell a bit of what happened generally do not tell anything at all. And especially some words about the compos are very important, because the reader might also want to know which productions are worth downloading.
I think if you are going to write a party report then you should plan this in advance and you also should WANT to write this report. Nothing is more boring than articles starting with "...my groupboss told me to get my ass up and do something for XYZ mag so I write this report..." because usually the quality of something you have to but do not like to do is not very good (that goes for everything, not only party-reports ;)). Also quite senseless are articles written 2 months after the party as the author has already forgotten everything of importance.
Plan your article. Write down interesting facts, write down your favourite compos and entries, write down funny sentences of sceners, shoot photos if you think they are funny or cool. I always do that, when I plan to write an article for a diskmag. For our homepage it's maybe not that bad when things are missing, but for a diskmag it hurts. A demoparty is always something which blows your mind with impressions of all kinds and after some days you might have already forgotten what was cool and even on which days special things happened. I realized it when writing my Assembly-report two (!) days after the party in the youth hostel. I couldn't remember anymore when which compo had taken place and if I hadn't had my notes and the schedule I'd have screwed up everything.
At this point I must say hello to Kowboy/Nextempire whose party reports I always enjoy reading. They look well planned (I guess they are...), are quite long and full with information, facts, fotos and fun. Just like reports should be, thanks. :))
So I quit with a sentence everyone knows: if you don't have anything worth writing, don't write it at all (you also save some work then...). But I hope you got something worth writing about parties. I'm looking forward to it.
StyX/HeadcrasH
- has once been in cologne but is not living there