Anybody who has ever had any experience being interviewed at length for someone else's story will understand that the bits that wind up being used are going to be a very small, and largely unpredictable, part of all that one has said to a reporter. In this case the reporter spent a remarkable amount of time talking with a number of quizbowl veterans, and she was in fact given a full picture of the landscape of the circuit. The idea that all those she talked with somehow conspired to ignore the existence of ACF or otherwise distort what the totality of the circuit IS, is ludicrous. Yes, it's too bad that she may have left the impression in one sentence that submitting one's own questions directly to tournaments is something from the past rather than also the present. This wasn't because those she talked to misdirected her. The subject of her story was not the circuit and its "sides" (if people insist on terming things that way; I do not), but the intersection between quizbowl and tv gameshow success. The genesis of her article was her becoming intrigued by the fact that Ken and Kevin, the two bigtime winners on Jeopardy and Millionaire, not only know one another but have both for years been partners in the same small question-writing company, formed entirely of players and former players in the quizbowl circuit. She found the quizbowl subculture she then learned a fair amount about interesting enough for a frontpage article in a mainstream publication, but with her focus on the gameshow connection it's not surprising that she or her editors would not choose to take general readers into subculture complexities of organization or faction. Compare this article to most of what gets written about quizbowl by outsiders; this is a pretty good job -- loads more accurate than was the 1999 New York Times piece, for instance.
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