Fan Versus Pro: Fight?

[kevin_standlee]

In the ongoing discussions about Fan Writer versus Pro Writer, I've repeatedly made the point (as have others) that "fan" and "pro" are not mutually exclusive states. You can be any of the four possible combinations. (If you're neither fan nor pro, you're not in the field at all, but it's a valid combination.)

I got to thinking about this, and this distinction is true in other areas as well, such as sports. One can be a baseball fan. A few people can be professional baseball players. But a pro can be a fan of the game, too. Some pro baseball players are not fans. Once they end their playing career, they pack away their gear, store it away, and never look at it again. Other former pro players are unabashedly fans of the game, too. Just look at the San Francisco Giants TV broadcasters Mike Krukow & Duane Kuiper. Both of them are former players, and today work as professional baseball broadcasters. But they are both clearly fans of baseball. Everything about they way they carry themselves and talk about baseball screams "fan" to me. And that's not a bad thing.

Update, 18:30: Corrected missing word "not" spotted in comments.

Comments

[k6rfm.livejournal.com]

Well, in two fields I'm familiar with -- amateur radio and software -- lots of people do both "amateur" and "professional" activities. I know lots of people who are electronic designers or who build, deploy, and maintain communications systems as their livelihood; but then in their free time they may do amateur radio emergency and public service work; design, scrounge parts for, build, and test equipment for microwave communication; or just talk on the radio while commuting. Similarly, a lot of programmers who work on commercial applications and systems then turn around and pitch in on an open source project.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Say, that's another good example! There's no reason someone who is a professional in the radio/TV industry can't be a licensed ham operator as well. The analogy, obviously, with SF/F is that SF "pro" = Radio "pro" and SF "fan" = Radio "ham."

Kevin
KE6APJ

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

Another example to my mind is the way NBC News Overnight used to get stories from their own network correspondents (they had an almost negative budget). They told them to take a story that Nightly News had "committeed" down to a minute-twenty and re-cut it to the length it needed. As long as the facts were good, Overnight would run it as submitted.

Even though these were professionals doing work for a profesisonal outlet, the attitude was IMO fannish.