Introducing the UK Film Blogs Charter

Blogging is great isn’t it? You write things, people read them and there’s a lovely community of excellent and supportive people on social media who tell you that you’re writing isn’t the filthiest abomination ever to contaminate their eyes and wither their soul, so that’s nice. The thing is, it can be a whole lot of work and if you don’t get a lot of traffic, comments or general feedback, it can be a bit of a downer. And we all need a little bit of support. That’s why UK Film Blogs was formed – it’s a loose collective of websites and blogs all with a broadly similar philosophy. While we might have different styles, specialities and readerships, we all believe in good, original writing.

Writing is a deliberate choice of word. There’s something else online which is posing as writing – they call it “content”. And you know, it’s easy to fall into that content trap – pushing out posts which have no merit, chasing those easy hits and reporting every rumour and vague announcement as it’s the second coming. It’s understandable why sites do this. Some of the best, and once biggest websites on the planet have fallen into that hole and aren’t ever coming back. There is a wider problem of sustaining any kind of publishing outlet and making it profitable, but guess what – we’re not profitable. It doesn’t pay to have principles, but then again it doesn’t seem to pay to give them up either so while it’s a labour of love, we might as well love what we do.

So we all had a chat and came up with the UK Film Blogs Charter – a code of conduct by which to blog honourably. It’s not prescriptive by any means. People can, of course do whatever the hell they want to. But these are the rules we will try to follow when we write, and hopefully we’ll make the internet slightly less ugly. Sure, it’s not the loftiest aspiration but these are the things that matter to us in this corner of our lives.

Have a read, download a copy if you want to and if you like it share it on your site and join our collective. If you hate it, then tell us all about that too and we’ll try to make it better.