Chuck Tryon
Chuck Tryon of The Chutry Experiment

Tell us about your blog.

The Chutry Experiment is a space for me to discuss any film and media topics that happen to catch my interest. Quite often it functions as a public research journal where I can discuss ideas related to my scholarship with others who have similar interests. My scholarly research can be somewhat eclectic, so every once in a while, my blog's focus will shift wildly from science-fiction television to documentary to and then to viral political videos. I also try to write reviews of most of the independent and documentary films that I see, in part because when I started the blog that seemed like an important niche that I could help to fill.

How would you describe your readers? Do you have much contact with the people who read you?

Many of my regular readers are professors of film or media studies. I'd imagine that most of my other readers are other film bloggers, find industry workers, and entertainment journalists. They are likely people who are invested in being involved in a wider conversation about film and media topics. In the book I'm writing, I've been trying to connect the practices of film blogging to what Charles Acland describes in Screen Traffic as the "felt internationalism" of the moviegoing audience. Acland proposes the idea that movie audiences, especially those who try to attend a movie when it first opens, are trying to participate in something larger than themselves. I think that many film bloggers are informed by that same impulse.

I'm in contact with quite a few of my readers, many through comments and email, but I've met a number of my readers at academic conferences and film festivals. And I've even had the opportunity to collaborate with professors at other universities on projects on the strength of connections that I've made on the blog.

Tell us how — and why — you started your blog?

I originally started the blog on Blogger, one of many free blogging services, back in 2003, and writing online was genuinely an experiment, as the name of my blog suggests. I started it because, at the time, I felt somewhat alienated from academic writing and wanted to find new forms of expression that might be somewhat more oriented towards a wider public. Initially, I wrote a lot about politics and my concerns about the war in Iraq, but as I continued to write, I found that the blog helped me recognize my interests more clearly, and ultimately I've become a little more specialized.

Describe your blog day — do you work at home? Go to a café? Sit in an office?

I don't really have a "blog day." The work that I do at The Chutry Experiment supplements other work that I'm doing, whether research for my book or teaching preparation. When I'm busy during the school year, I can go several days without posting. But in the summer and on days when I don't teach, I often have the kind of flexible schedule that allows me to write without worrying about other obligations. Often I'll find that it's helpful for me to write a quick blog post in the morning in order to build momentum for working on other things. But I'll also write posts as I'm winding down for the night.

How do you find things to blog about and how do you decide that a entry is worth being in your blog?

It varies quite a bit, actually. Because the blog serves in part as a kind of research journal, I'm somewhat indiscriminate about what I blog, simply because I've discovered that I will often discover a deeper interest in a topic after I've written a few entries on it. Often, I'll find topics by skimming my RSS feeds or by reading the headlines in the film sections of major newspapers. I'm always searching for things that my readers might find interesting.

For a while I tried to write a review of every movie that I saw in theaters, but that has become pretty unmanageable, and because there is a limited selection of independent and foreign films in theaters here in Fayetteville, I haven't been as inspired to keep up that habit. But when I attend a festival such as Full Frame or Silverdocs, I'll try to write reviews of as many films as I can.