April 20, 2005

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Online Alternative to Corporate Media
Independent Film Journalist Bucks the Trend Toward the Untrustworthy

New York, NY (April 20) -- Independent film critic MaryAnn Johanson, one of the most popular, most respected, and longest-posting movie reviewers on the Internet, believes one way to restore the waning trust in journalism is to remove it from the morass of corporate conflicts that plague the mainstream media.

"With my Micropatron fundraising drive," Johanson explains, "the donations of individual moviegoers, rather than corporate sponsors, supports truly unrestrained criticism." To Johanson, her project to become the first film critic in any media to be supported entirely by readers becomes more important with each new story of fabrication, plagiarism, and other ethical transgressions in the corporate media.

"It's no wonder no one trusts Big News anymore," Johanson says. "The *Wall Street Journal* just reported that a slew of presumed impartial consumer advocates regularly accept payments from corporations to endorse their products on-air. The New York *Daily News* just removed two writers who cover entertainment and media to other beats, even though they were respected investigators of the industry. Because watchdogs are too 1970s, I guess.

"My favorite new example," continues Johanson, "of the problem with corporate media is the one about General Motors pulling advertising from the *Los Angeles Times* because the paper's auto critic dared to actually criticize GM's products. That says to me that corporations expect the media not to have any teeth, and will punish the media when it does show a little backbone."

Johanson, who's been posting film, TV, and pop-culture criticism at FlickFilosopher.com for more than seven and a half years, explains that her Micropatron project "is about proving that there is an audience for noncorporate film criticism that is beholden to no one and nothing."

As Jack Shafer in Slate says about unpaid "opinion journalists" who work online, they "have an edge over the pros" because their "independence gives them a subversive strength, one that undermines the cozy relationship the press has with its corporate cousins..."

"But subversive independence," Johanson insists, "cannot, by definition, be supported by advertisers or corporate sponsors. It has to be supported by readers."

FlickFilosopher.com debuted on the Web in 1997 and has been continually publishing since, ranking it among the granddaddy of all movie sites online. Internet traffic service Alexa.com places the site in the top 1 percent of *all* sites online, and *Variety* has named Johanson, a New York City-based freelance writer, "one of online's finest" film critics.

More information on the Micropatronage project:
http://www.flickfilosopher.com/flickfilos/micropatrons.shtml

More information on FlickFilosopher.com:
http://www.flickfilosopher.com/flickfilos/press.shtml

Interview contact:
MaryAnn Johanson
thechick@flickfilosopher.com
914-843-9136

Sources:

The Wall Street Journal: Advice for sale
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB111386025685009961-
IBjgINplal4mpymbX6HcK6Gm4,00.html

IMDB: Top Media Journalists Reassigned by New York Daily News
http://imdb.com/news/sb/2005-04-12/#tv2

Slate: Corporate America's Journalism Problem
http://slate.msn.com/id/2116475/

Slate: Bloggers Freer Than Reporters?
http://slate.msn.com/id/2116498/

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