Hal “Smithereens” Duncan, over at the Night Shade boards:

I won’t deny that mainstream media is more than willing to jump on the easy “Sci-Fi Fans Beam Down To Glasgow“ story and exploit the freak show for all it’s worth, but at the same time, we have the masquerades and the filking and the furries and downright loons who buttonhole you in a corridor to tell you about the arcane mysteries hidden within this specific episode of Babylon 5 they’ve typed out from the video and are carrying with them in their bag (and that's a real incident I remember from last Worldcon). If crime fans all got together and wore trenchcoats and fired water pistols at each other, the media would treat that with the same Paxmanesque ye-e-e-e-es. The media exploit the spectacle of frippery, but they don’t craft it out of thin air; fandom is, for many people, partly about all that stuff, every convention a golden opportunity for exhibitionists to make spectacles of themselves. Part of me cringes, part of me says power to them; it’s not my idea of fun (largely) but po-faced puritanism isn’t my style so I’m not going to frown on it. But the subculture is absolutely begging to have the piss taken out of it.

Man, I would totally become a mystery writer if it meant trenchcoats and fedoras and water pistols.

Okay, I wouldn’t. But I would laugh at newspaper articles about mystery conventions.