Popgurls FAQ

Who the hell are these new people - Amanda, Amy, Lyn and Michelle? Why should I care about them?

Well, here's the thing. After five years of running the site (really! Five years! We launched on April 16th, 2001), we decided to shed our pen names along with the skin of the old site. There's nothing salacious about it. Life is change, right? All our personal pieces are still here, now filed under Musings.

Crib notes:
Amanda = willa
Amy = loki
Lyn = lunec (pronounced "lunacy" for those who kept calling her "lu-neck")
Michelle = eiddy

You can learn more about the PopGurls proper, and PopGurls: The Site (Sort of like Spaceballs: The Movie, but not) in "About Us." Whether or not you care about us is between you and your god.

Why did you start this site?

Once upon a time, there was a group of girls who e-mailed each other all day, every day, with entertaining pop culture anecdotes. When it became impossible to keep track of all the banter, the idea of a website came about. One AIM brainstorming session later, and Amy and Michelle proposed PopGurls.com. Everyone agreed that it might be mildly amusing to pursue, and here we are - a foursome of pop culture junkies.

We might not have made it this far if it hadn't been for the foresight of Kathy, our original programmer/designer, who took our kooky little idea and made it function like a professional website. When we saw her first ideas, we started looking closer at our content and thought, "Whoa. This could be more than we thought it could be."

Who reads this stuff anyway?

Check out our readership info in "About Us."

I'm a guy, am I supposed to be reading a site called PopGurls?

Strangely enough, we get asked this more often than you'd think. Everyone is invited here - gurls, guys, transgenders, transvestites, ice cream truck drivers, professional bowlers, ferret wranglers. If you like a bit of snark in your pop culture obsessions, you're in the right place.

Why PopGurls? Because we're gurls, duh. And if you're really curious - we spell it with a U due to Amy's longtime obsession with Big Star's "September Gurls," and her need to force that spelling on everyone she knows. (Also, last time we checked, PopGirls was a porn site.)

What if I want to give my $.02 on topics you cover?

There is a link to send the authors e-mail in the byline of just about every article on the site. If you want to send feedback on the site in general, you can find contact info on all the PopGurls in "About Us."

Longtime fans of the site might have noticed that we no longer have a message board. We've decided to take it down for now, although it might be back in some future incarnation.

Do you accept blind article submissions? How do I become a guest writer?

We're always looking for new writers with a fresh perspective. To save you time and hassle, we would recommend that you send an email to submissions AT popgurls DOT com and pitch us your story idea. It should look something like this:

"Dear PopGurls:

I couldn't help but notice that you never write any stories about (enter topic here). I'm a huge fan of (topic) and I think your readers would really dig it, too. I would love to write an article about (topic) for your site. What do you think?"

It is likely that we will ask you to submit a writing sample of some sort, and we reserve the right to decline your offer based on (among other things) writing skills or that it's just not quite a right fit for PopGurls. It is also possible, because we occasionally do plan ahead, that one of our writers is already working on a story about your topic. This doesn't mean we stole your idea.

Great - if you like my idea, will I get paid for writing it?

No.

Can I still submit story ideas if I'm a boy?

You wouldn't believe how much email some of our male contributors get, wondering why they'd want to participate in such a gurlie site. The truth is, we believe boys can like pop culture just as much as we do, and we welcome that perspective on the site. Also, we are no longer 12, and aren't worried about catching boy cooties anymore.

How can I find out when you update?

We've made it oh-so-easy for y'all to get the PopGurls updates!

You can join the update email list - there's a link on the main PopGurls.com page.

For those of you who are also citizens of Livejournal.com, we have a journal specifically for PopGurls updates: popgurls, natch. Feel free to add us to your friends list.

MySpace netizens can add us here: http://www.myspace.com/popgurls.

Be adventurous and join all three!

There's a lot more stuff here than I anticipated. How can I narrow the field?

We have a handy search function for just such an occasion. If you still can't find what you're looking for, feel free to email one of the PopGurls and ask for it.

I remember way back when you guys mostly covered *NSYNC. What happened to all that stuff?

Ah, those were the days, weren't they?

Because our interests in The Boys have waned (in no small part due to the never-ending hiatus), we decided to disband the "Shame" section and move everything into The Attic.

What about the Degrassi: The Next Generation Recaps? I'm still waiting on several seasons, you slackers!

Yes, yes, we know. Trust us, if we ever regain our great love for the Canadian melodrama (we have a weird thing for girls that say a-boot), and the time to catch up on all those eps, we might actually finish out the series. Until then, re-read your favorites in The Attic.

How did you get so-and-so to agree to an interview?

The short answer is, we asked. The longer answer is that all of us have journalism experience somewhere in our pasts, and we have mastered the art of the query letter.

Can you help me get an interview with so-and-so, too?

As with anything, we keep our site going by building relationships. Over the years we've developed ties with publicists, managers, personal assistants, dog walkers...you name it. These people trust us and help us secure the interviews you see here. Giving out their information, even to other would-be writers, would betray that trust. If you're looking for a way to contact your favorite celebrity, we suggest you look for the info the old-fashioned way - Google it.

Okay. But you can surely pass on a message to your interview subjects, right?

Nope. If you want to send fanmail to anyone who's been interviewed for PopGurls.com, we'd suggest you search the web for the proper address. Television shows are particularly good at providing addresses for fanmail - especially shows with hunky boys who get that sort of thing - but it's not too difficult to track down other celebs as well. MySpace is a veritable hotbed of this sort of information these days.

If I link to you, will you link to me?

No.

We are forever grateful to folks who post links for PopGurls on their own websites. However, we do not have a page where we display links or banners, and we do not plan to create one in the future.

It sure is handy that you posted that hot picture of Josh Holloway on your site! It's okay if I hotlink it to my own page, right?

Wrong. We obsessively track our hits, and if you hotlink to one of our pics, and it starts draining our bandwidth, we will hunt you down like the dog you are. Then we'll just move the picture or take it down.

Isn't information posted on the web fair game for anyone to reproduce?

Absolutely not. Anything posted on PopGurls.com is property of the same, and reproduction of any of our articles without our permission is stealing. We're cool with folks posting a paragraph or two of our essays/interviews/reviews on their own websites, as long as they link back to us. However, reposting an entire article, even with credit, makes you a bad person. And karma is a bitch. If we find out you've done this, expect a cranky letter asking you to remove our content from your site.