If you want to picture what ROFLcon was like, just imagine Disneyland for memes. As a ROFLcon staffer said in the opening ceremony, one in every eight attendees was a guest of honor, AKA somebody who “has done something crazy on the Internet.”
So in between writing stories—I got some great stories and even a video out of ROFLcon—I had a chance to meet my favorite memes in real life. A surprising many were just as endearing as you’d expect. When I snapped this photo of taxidermist Chuck Testa with a squirmy puppy, he quipped, “I’m getting really good!” Believe me, he was at it with the one-liners all weekend.
One of my favorite parts was getting my picture taken with Antoine Dodson, the “Bed Intruder” ranter himself. I stopped him in the hallway and got another fan to take our photo together (afterward, I took a photo of him with her.) Dodson was loving it. He took photos and signed autographs all day in a schedule that would have exhausted a jaded mainstream celebrity.
I thought nothing of tweeting a photo of Dodson and I. But later, while reporting the next story of the day, I started to worry about whether I’d violated one of the rules of journalism by acting like a fan at an event I’d been assigned to cover.
Bad journalistic behavior is a topic that makes its way into the news from time to time. When a female reporter wrote up her GQ interview with Chris Evans as if it were a date, getting drunk with the star and even passing out at his house, reviews were mixed, to say the least.
Less ambiguous was an incident this week between a Montreal TV Host and David Beckham—the reporter asked Beckham to autograph a pair of underwear in a move other journalists near-universally denounced as unprofessional.
Is it ever professional for a reporter to act like a fan? Here’s what I think.
It’s NOT OK when:
- You are currently reporting on the star. You can wait until after the interview to let them know you’re a fan. Try to do it with as low key an attitude as you can muster!
- You’re at a group press conference, or anywhere that an expression of your fandom would be disruptive to the star or to other reporters.
- You find yourself using your position as a reporter to try to get closer to the star. If you’ve been given a press pass to interview the celebrity, be the professional the celebrity is expecting to see. You can go to the autograph signing with the other fans later.
It’s OK when:
- You’re not on active duty as a reporter and you run into the star in passing. If you don’t plan to report on it, you don’t need to act like a reporter. (You should still be decently polite though, of course.)
Of course, these are just guidelines based on my own experiences. In any case, it’s important to use your own judgement. For example, depending on the fame of the person People like Antoine Dodson and Chuck Testa are just Internet-famous, so their fame doesn’t affect their everyday lives. I’m sure they loved being popular at ROFLcon and didn’t mind the attention of fans.
That evening at ROFLcon, I consulted the Daily Dot’s community manager, Logan Youree, about my tweet. Luckily, Logan agreed that it wasn’t unprofessional. In fact, he thought our audience would find it logical for us to want to meet the people we cover all the time. I was running on caffeine and sleep deprivation, so I just wrote to him to ask him to remind me what he meant:
“In some sense the Daily Dot is a true newspaper, but we are also enthusiast press,” he wrote. “We are supposed to write about the news in online communities but also about the things that interest us about them.”
From that perspective, my only concern is making sure I’m not too enthusiastic about my reporting topics. It’s a problem I’m happy to have.