About

I’m Mitch. Clay Tribune is my paper — films, shows, games, comics, records and the news, covered the way I would want to read about them.

Where I’m from

Born and raised on Staten Island. I left New York for the Appalachians, and I live in Houston now. Three places that do not have much in common except that I have been at home in all of them, which turns out to be useful for a job that involves writing about the whole country.

I run my own businesses. I have a family. Most of what I know about people I learned in sales, which is really a long apprenticeship in how people actually decide things — what they say they want, what they want, and the distance between the two. That shows up in this paper more than any of the film theory ever will.

Where I stand

I lean down the middle and I do not have a team. I vote on morals, ethics and values, and if that puts me on one side of a question this year and the other side next year, so be it — that is what voting on principle looks like from the outside.

I do not trust the government much. I think institutions look after themselves before they look after the ordinary American, and I would rather say that here than pretend to a neutrality nobody has. You should know the hand that runs a paper. This is mine.

What that means in practice: this site is not carrying anyone’s water. When something is good it gets said, when it is bad it gets said, and the scores are not up for negotiation.

What I like

Movies and television. Games, new and old. Comics. Records. Being around people — I would rather argue about a film in a room than in a comment section. The paper covers what I actually pay attention to, which is why the review indexes run deep on some things and are thin on others.

Why it reads the way it does

I like American literature, and I wanted a paper that sounded like it had read some. Not old-fashioned. Plain. Short sentences, concrete nouns, the fact before the flourish, the strongest word sitting in the plainest place. That is a very American way to write, and it is the register everything here aims at.

Where the vocabulary came from

This started as a stricter idea. Every article was written using only words found in Edgar Allan Poe’s letters, tales and criticism — 27,923 of them — and anything outside that list was refused. Drafts were rewritten until they passed, and a draft that could not pass was thrown away.

It worked, in the sense that it taught the writing to be spare. It also cost more than it bought. A rule that refuses the right word sends you looking for a vaguer one, and vaguer is a bad trade in a newspaper.

So the list stayed and the rule went. That vocabulary is still what the prose is pulled toward, and it is still why the writing here is plainer than most. But when a story needs the word streaming, or subscription, or lossless, it gets the word. Nothing is refused any more for being modern, and accuracy is never traded for register.

What is here

Reviews of films, games, albums and television, scored and kept in indexes you can read straight through. Daily reporting across film, gaming, music, technology, money and sport. Reviews of what is in cinemas now, written from what critics actually said rather than from memory.

How it is built

Openly. The paper is produced by an automated pipeline that I built, and How this is made sets out what is automated and what is not. A fair amount of it gets built on camera at The Mitchery.