Skip to content

James Hoare

James is the Editor. Send him your article pitches, press releases, and hot tips to james@thecompanion.app so he can yell “It’s a scoop!” in the style of a 1930s newspaper editor.

What makes a great Companion article?

You tell me.

Seriously, you tell me.

A great Companion article is born in that moment that you tumble down a Wiki hole and hit the bottom. It’s born the moment you’re reading an old Starlog article and you wonder what happened next. It’s born in the hunger for really specific answers to really specific questions, only to find that the answer doesn’t exist until you go out there and answer it your damn self.

A great Companion article is about that thrill of discovery, no matter how trivial or inane it might seem to those outside our tree house, and the thrill you get from sharing that discovery with others. It’s the kind of article you feel was written especially for you.

A great Companion article isn’t an article you’ve seen somewhere else. It’s not about being divisive in the name of traffic. Neither is it about rewriting history or wallpapering opinion as if it's fact. A great Companion article is about putting in the work and asking the questions. A great Companion article can be opinionated, sure, but it’s rigorously qualified and passionately argued.

A great Companion article realizes that a great TV show never really ends. Fans didn’t stop being fans the second their favorite show stopped airing. They still debate the decisions, weep for the tragedies, and roar with the triumphs, so a great Companion article is just as vibrant and urgent as the fandom it speaks for.

Most of all, a great Companion article is about love. It’s about loving your favorite TV show or movie warts and all. It’s about loving it enough to have frank conversations about where it let you down as much as it is praising its triumphs. It’s about celebrating the small, silly things, as well as the big obvious things.

If that’s you, we should be friends.

(A great Companion article is also written in US English, prefers Chicago style title case, Harvard style for commas, carefully rations exclamation marks, and believes anything shorter than 2,000 words is a waste of time, but that doesn’t really work as a call to arms.)

Comments

Latest