Cult of the Semi-Pro?

There are a great number of movie reviews available on the internet, which are written by a diverse group of people. Most scientists and scholars only divide this group in professionals and amateurs in their articles. Andrew Keen, for example warned us about these amateurs who may endanger the usefulness of professionals in the cultural landscape. But movie reviews are not only written by paid professionals and unchecked amateurs. There are also many websites with an editorial staff which works without payment, like Dutch websites Filmtotaal en Movie2movie. Because these movie reviewers are volunteers but are under supervision of a group of editors, they are called ‘semiprofessionals’ in this thesis. The question that is interesting to research is if these semiprofessionals are a distinct group of movie reviewers and if they are a threat to the usefulness of professional movie reviewers, or if they are more like amateurs. To research this question the movie reviews from professionals, semiprofessionals and amateurs have been analyzed using a content analysis. In this research, the High Art and popular discourse of the different movie reviewers are investigated, as well as the form of the movie reviews they use. Also a few interviews have been held with the different movie reviewers to search for the reason of these differences and to see if their attitude toward writing a movie review is different. The results show that the groups of professionals, semiprofessionals and amateurs are really different kind of groups that have unique characteristics. The reviews of amateurs are of a lesser quality than the reviews of the other reviewers, but results show that some of them can also write in a high quality and for a highbrow audience. The professionals are less objective as expected and their aim is mostly to make their reviews as unique as possible. But they do go through a lot of professional journalistic routines and have very extensive movie knowledge. Semiprofessionals have a lot of motivation because they want to prove themselves to their peers. This is why they write very much toward the target group and try to make their reviews as easy and interesting to read as possible. But still their movie knowledge is narrowed down to one or a few genres. What is very interesting is that the semiprofessionals score higher on the High Art and journalistic form criteria than the professionals. This makes the semiprofessional (theoretically) a better writer for the Highbrow audience as well as the general public and a better writer overall. But the task of gatekeeper and caretaker of cultural legitimacy that the professional movie reviewers have cannot be taken over by the semiprofessionals because they do not have the reputation, connections and wide-ranging movie knowledge the professional movie reviewers have. But this research shows that the semiprofessional is a distinct group on the internet and we should not only divide the group of reviewers in highbrow and lowbrow or professionals and amateurs, which has become very outdated.