Gareb Shamus: A Close Reading

So, I understand that there are platitudes and company lines that need to come out of spokespeople's mouths in public relations situations; that's reality, and it's also one of the reasons why working in PR made me want to hit myself in the head with a hammer on a near-daily basis. I believe that the way we use words and language is extremely important, and unless you're willing to view the sounds that come out of people's mouths as phonological white noise, that it's important to examine what they say -- and what they don't.

Gareb Shamus on leaving the IFL and going to Wizard World Chicago, everybody!

"It’s actually very exciting," he said. "I have a renewed energy. Even though it’s my own company, I’ve been able to come back and take a fresh look with the Wizard team at a lot of the new things we could be doing. We have a lot of new initiatives coming up; we have a lot of new people in the company. This show is real evidence that there are a lot of new and exciting things going on."

All right, let's break this down line by line:

"It’s actually very exciting"

So, he's excited. About something. Got it. What next?

"Even though it’s my own company, I’ve been able to come back and take a fresh look with the Wizard team at a lot of the new things we could be doing."

So what he's saying is that there are, in fact, things -- new things -- that Wizard COULD be doing. He is able to figure this out despite owning Wizard. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's all true. So what kind of things are these new things?

"We have a lot of new initiatives coming up;"

"New initiatives" sounds suspiciously like "new things," and I still don't know what these things are. Are they also exciting and new and fun? And new? And exciting? Things?

"we have a lot of new people in the company."

That's an interesting spin on significant staff purges. Semantic question: Does moving people into different positions actually make them "new"?

"This show is real evidence that there are a lot of new and exciting things going on."

Is it? I think it's hard to construe the show as "evidence" of these "things" that may or not happen in the future, especially when you don't name any of those things. Or how the show proves that they exist. Unless we're talking about the present, and the show itself. But Wizard World Chicago is hardly a new convention, nor do the most positive reports indicate that anything unusual went down, unless you went expecting the con to fail outright and were disappointed. Is not failing "new" and "exciting" for Wizard's management? It is possible.

Shamus subsequently mentions a closer consolidation of the magazine, website, and conventions, which is... kind of new, though given the recently personnel changes, it sounds less like an ingenious plan and more like a thinning staff being spread even wider.

WHICH IS TO SAY: Gareb Shamus is back from the IFL with fresh insights into Wizard. He thinks things could happen there, and that when they happen, those things will be new.