John J. Galbo

Sure did — middle school, right at the hinge point where the typewriter lab was being phased out for Macs.

Honestly? I've spent 24 years hesitating to use the word. I started a fan site about a cartoon made of talking fast food when I was a teenager, and at some point — somewhere between the convention floors, the interviews, and the 2 AM premiere recaps — the habits became the job: show up, get it right, name your sources, correct it when you blow it, and never pretend you were somewhere you weren't. Nobody handed me a credential for that; I just kept doing it until the receipts piled up. So to me it means being a reliable witness. Not the biggest outlet, not the fastest aggregator — the person who was actually watching, wrote down what happened, and cared enough to get the details right for the twelve people who'd notice and the twelve thousand who wouldn't. If you do that long enough about anything — even a block of weird late-night cartoons — it turns out that's the whole job.

The unglamorous truth: WordPress, running on the Classic Editor, which they will pry from my cold dead hands. Under the hood it's a small army of plugins doing the heavy lifting — Rank Math for SEO, Wordfence standing guard against a surprisingly persistent stream of villains, MailPoet for The Test Pattern newsletter, Formidable for forms, WPeMatico quietly herding five podcast feeds into place every night. Beyond the site: Google Workspace for the editorial side, Discord for the community, OBS for Twitch nights, and a Pixel that's taken every convention photo I've published for years. But if I'm honest, the most important tool in my kit lately is the Internet Archive — I've spent this year excavating two decades of my own work out of the Wayback Machine after various hosts and partners took it to the grave. Ask me about that sometime. Actually, don't; we'll be here all day.

The embarrassing truth: I wanted to go to a party. Back in the late 2000s, Adult Swim threw its own Upfront presentation every year in New York — lineup previews followed by a legitimately extravagant bash with whoever the musical flavor of the year was. Outkast one year. I wanted in and had no earthly idea how. There was a writer named Hunter Stephenson — real name or pseudonym, I never learned — covering Adult Swim for SlashFilm, an absolute darling of AS PR in those days, and an Upfront attendee. The year they didn't invite him back, I picked his brain, and he said two words that rewired my life: "online press." The lightbulb went off — I was already running fan sites. What if I covered the news? Wrote it all down, did it properly, and somehow wrote my way into that room? The invite never came — and then the party itself stopped existing. Somewhere between WB mergers, the Adult Swim Upfront got consolidated into one big presentation with Cartoon Network and TNT and TBS and everything else the company owns, and the extravagant bash with the musical guest went with it. Twenty years of coverage, and the closest I got was William Tokarsky inviting me to the hotel where the Adult Swim talent was staying — which is honestly a better story anyway. Always the bridesmaid, and eventually there wasn't even a wedding. So: I became a journalist to get into a party that no longer exists. The work outlived the reason I started it — by about fifteen years and counting. There's probably a lesson in there about doing the thing instead of chasing the room, but mostly I just wish I'd seen Outkast.

Draft: Don't wait for permission. Nobody was ever going to assign me the Aqua Teen beat — I invented it, covered it like it mattered, and eventually the interviews and the press rooms followed the work. Pick the thing you'd write about for free (because early on, you will), and cover it with more care than anyone thinks it deserves. Care is the whole differentiator. Anyone can aggregate; almost nobody follows up, checks the spelling of the animator's name, or shows up the next year too. Two practical ones, learned the hard way. First: relationships compound. The publicist you were patient with, the guest who had a good experience, the fellow weirdo running the site next door — a decade later, those are the people who answer your emails. Second: own your archive. Platforms die, partners vanish, domains get redirected to some guy's Lebowski site. I've spent this year digging twenty years of my own work out of the Internet Archive because I trusted other people's servers. Keep your own copies. Future-you is your most important reader.

After my second cup of coffee. :D (Realistically: email whenever -I read in the evenings, and "PRESS" in the subject line jumps the queue.)

Skybound, NYCC 2023. Out of nowhere: a press invite to their Energon Universe panel — Transformers, GI Joe, Void Rivals, the whole line. A fan-built outlet like ours getting treated as press by Robert Kirkman's shop was not a small thing, and I'll be honest about how ready I was: I had next to nothing prepared and the Q&A format ate me alive. (I'm still not entirely sure I ever published the piece from that first year, which haunts me a little.) But here's why it's the best pitch I ever got: it was the start of a relationship instead of a transaction. In 2024 I reached out to ask if they were doing press again, and it had upgraded — round tables. Actual seats, actual follow-ups: how Kirkman's crew was approaching the Transformers lore, the GI Joe team lineup, how Void Rivals threads into the rest of the universe. And the detail that stuck with me: Kirkman himself suggested questions go around the table in rounds so every outlet got equal swings — the biggest name in the room making sure the smallest outlet got its turn. That's the whole thing, right there. The best pitches aren't the loudest ones; they're the ones that assume you belong at the table — and then Kirkman literally built the table that way.

Two, both immortalized on The Swimcast. The first was an email asking us to "please release the epeasod Slave Carl." Not a typo — theirs, not mine. To this day I don't know what episode they meant, and "epeasod" has been load-bearing vocabulary among my friends for the better part of two decades. The second arrived for our 100th episode: a request that we "air Death Note at like 1am." We are, I must stress, a fan podcast — we do not control a television network. We dismantled that email on-air with a thoroughness I still feel slightly bad about, and my co-host Trish delivered the coup de grâce by replying with a YouTube link to an episode of Death Note and instructions to "play it 'at like 1am.'" Note that neither pitch was from a publicist. The professionals have never once asked me to release the epeasod. I respect them enormously for it.

Coffees and Boozes mostly. On rarest occasions, mixed together.

These days, Variety and Deadline — partly by choice, partly because my inbox decides for me. When you cover entertainment, the trades are the weather report: you read them every day whether you feel like it or not. What I actually admire is the machinery — the sourcing, the speed, the embargo discipline of a Mike Fleming exclusive landing at exactly 9:00 AM. Twenty years of reading announcement cycles taught me how this business actually communicates, which made me better at covering my own weird little corner of it.

That we ARE Adult Swim. Twenty-plus years in, the single most common message I receive is someone pitching me their show. I've been offered pilots, scripts, entire animated universes — one applicant to our writing team just wrote "Hire me, cowards," which I have to respect on craft alone. So the most load-bearing sentence on our entire website is "We are not Adult Swim, and we cannot get your cartoon on TV." It's in the FAQ, the contact page, and at this point possibly my will. The affectionate read: people confuse us for the network because the coverage is thorough enough to blur the line. It's the most exhausting compliment I've ever been paid — for twenty years straight.