Tuesday, January 2, 2018

Magazine Coverage By Reviewers

Update 3/30/18: Removed reviewer CPayseur per his request.

We're adding Jason McGregor and Charles Payseur to RSR's Recommended By list and changing our criteria for "prolific reviewer" to make up for low coverage of Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Strange Horizons magazines, as shown in red in the table below. Without more coverage, stories from these magazines are at a disadvantage in the YTD By Score list and 2018 Hugo Awards page.


The table lists the 11 magazines covered by RSR along with the current five prolific reviewers whose monthly short fiction recommendations and/or "year's best SF/F" anthologies are linked to in the RSR monthly and Year-to-Date ratings.

The magazines covered by the monthly reviewers (Sam Tomaino at SFRevu, Gardner Dozois and Rich Horton at Locus Magazine) is determined by looking at which magazines contained the stories they reviewed over the past few years.

The magazines covered by the "year's best SF/F" anthologists (Gardner Dozois, Rich Horton, Jonathan Strahan, Neil Clarke) is determined by the stories included in their past 2-3 anthologies, except where the person is also a monthly reviewer, in which case we use the magazines covered in their monthly columns.

We chose to add Jason McGregor and Charles Payseur because they review widely (over 500 stories a year), they cover Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Strange Horizons magazines, and their recommendations are shared regularly on File 770. For now, RSR will use their 2017 recommended reading lists and treat them as "year's best SF/F" anthologists. Moving forward, we may consider linking to their monthly reviews as well.

As for low coverage of Tor novellas, that's partly mitigated by a link to the novella on GoodReads.com in each RSR review for our readers to see what other people thought of the story. (The table assumes that Horton and Strahan will post lists of their favorite novellas later this month, as they did last year.)

We still don't have a good solution to the problem that stories in anthologies don't get enough reviewers.

Note: These reviewers cover other magazines, but the table shows only magazines regularly reviewed  by RSR.

1 comment (may contain spoilers):

  1. Good to hear! I often see those two come up when I click the Other Reviews search links you include here. I've really enjoyed Charles' reviews for a while now. And it sounds like Jason is gearing up to cover more at his blog this year.

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