Rotten Tomatoes Has Announced Some Big Changes In An Effort To Boost Critic Diversity
Critic aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes has announced that it's planning a major overhaul of its certification process in order to bring in a broader range of movie and TV reviews. More past the jump...
Rotten Tomatoes continues to come under fire from fans, critics and filmmakers who believe that the current "rotten" or "fresh" grading system is too simplistic, often resulting in very harsh scores. It has also been noted that the majority of critics that have their work published on the site skew white and male.
In an effort to address these concerns, RT has announced plans for a major overhaul.
First and foremost, the site will relax its critic certification process to allow prolific reviewers who might not be full-time employees of a known publication to get their reviews published. In addition, members will be able to contribute podcasts and video reviews as well as written ones.
Here's what Rotten Tomatoes’ critics relations manager Jenny Jediny has to say about these new guidelines.
Over the past few years, our team has added hundreds of new voices to the Tomatometer on top of the thousands we currently have, with the goal of creating a critics pool that closely reflects the global entertainment audience. We took another key step today by revamping our critics criteria that both shifts our focus to approving critics individually rather than through publications, and introduces updated guidelines for newer media platforms to be a part of the Tomatometer.
The general perception is that people put far too much stock in RT scores, but there's no denying that it can be a handy tool if you're just looking for an overall idea of the critical consensus. Hopefully, these changes will result in a more positive experience for users and contributors.