Dan Copulsky interviewed himself about who he is and what he is planning to do with Question Riot. This interview was drafted in December 2009 and revised in January 2010.
What is Question Riot?
Question Riot is a site where I interview people who create things I admire or have interesting things to say. I hope to have at least one new interview up each week.
Who are you?
My name is Dan. I graduated from college about half a year ago. I make money working at a sandwich shop and sometimes doing other odd jobs, like helping a writer find publications to submit stories to. I also write, juggle, and edit a little magazine. There are links to the magazine and my other projects at dancopulsky.com. I live in Chicago with my girlfriend, who is in medical school, and our friend, who is an aspiring actor. I am kind of shy.
Who do you want to interview?
I’m trying to avoid making rules and I’m trying to keep it varied. I want it to be okay to occasionally do something like interview myself or have a interview that’s a number of people each offering their answer to the same question.
Right now I’m kind of focusing on people involved in web comics because there are many I admire and they are relatively accessibly. I also want to interview people involved in visual arts, writing, movies, and zines. Music too, maybe. I wouldn’t mind interviewing some people who are involved in interesting but less creative things as well. Even if I can use a growing readership and reputation to get bigger and bigger names, I also want to give some attention to people who are fairly unknown, like this one girl who wrote a great web comic she hasn’t updated in a year. I want to occasionally interview my friends as well, to help them gain audiences for their projects and just to hear some of the interesting things they have to say.
I’m also particularly interested in talking to people about not just creative work they’ve directly produced, but the projects they are behind that support and encourage others’ creativity. I’d like to talk to the people who started the Center for Cartoon Studies (a school for indie comic artists) and some guys I met who started a book publishing company that makes all their books by hand.
How are you interviewing people?
Before I interview people, I’ve been trying to read a few interviews they’ve done with other people. I’m trying to ask people new questions, things that curious fans couldn’t figure out from a quick search online.
When it comes to the actual interview, I’ve been doing it over email, sending a couple questions at a time. I thought this would be a casual way to interview people that would minimize the time and work necessary while still letting me ask some follow-up questions. But sometimes people forget and you have to remind them a couple of times before they answer your questions and then an interview can take a long time to complete. So I’ve been thinking about other options. Interviewing people by phone or in person means you have to deal with the hassle of recording and transcribing the whole thing. Interviewing over a chat program would probably be worth trying.
Who’s said no when you asked them from for an interview?
When I sent some of the first emails asking people, I had a line in there like, “If you want to save your time being interviewed for sites with established readership, I hope you’ll reconsider when this site has had a chance to establish a readership.” It gave them an easy out to say no if they weren’t interested, and it gave me an easy in for asking again later. But everyone I asked said yes (though I haven’t heard back from one of them in a while). I think sending notes that were complimentary, sincere, and polite might have helped.
Do you have any other future plans for the site or dreams for where it might go?
It would be really cool if this led this a job doing interviews from some big site or magazine. It would also be really cool if I started making $25 a day from ad revenue and could depend on this site for some financial support and then devote a lot more time to it and maybe start posting an interview every day. Maybe this could lead to putting together a book or anthology. Maybe I could start a podcast too. Eventually, maybe I’ll get other people involved in doing interviews for the site. Right now, though, I’m just really excited to be talking to people I admire and exposing new people to their projects.
If someone’s interested in being interviewed for this site, is there something you’d appreciate them doing that would make that happening more likely?
If someone would like to be interviewed, I’d like it if they dropped me a quick note saying so and either linking to their work or briefly describing the subject they’d like to talk to me about. I’d be ecstatic to hear from people who are well known, but I’d be happy to hear from people who aren’t too. If I’m not interested in doing an interview, I probably won’t reply. If I am, I might reply immediately, but I might also just reply eventually.
How can we support this site?
Please participate in the comments. Please share this site with others. Please consider advertising here once I get advertising here set up. Tell me if you want to be interviewed. Feel free to send me suggestions about people to interview, particularly if you think they’d be interested and especially if you know them well enough that you could help encourage them to agree. But, also, thanks for just reading.
Links to Dan’s projects – dancopulsky.com
Email: dan@questionriot.com
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