LotD

The WSJ has an article on fanfiction here. The WSJ!

However: Increasingly, audiences have become used to watching videos posted by other users on sites such as YouTube and MySpace. Reading fiction online is another extention of this trend.

Fanfiction has been around way longer than YouTube and MySpace, which are recent addictions (the former which I enjoy, the latter which I avoid).

Many stories take the form of prequels, imagining the back stories of central characters. Crossover fantasies also have long been a key element of fan fiction, pairing characters from different books or shows.

I would argue with the word 'many'. Yes, there are prequels, but there also codas ("episode finishers"), missing scenes, sequels, stand alones, PWPs, vignettes, drabbles and filks.

Unfortunately, the link to the most popular fanfiction on the 'net is only available to subscribers and I stopped with the WSJ after graduate school. I'm just curious how they characterize 'popular' because even within fandoms, you have 'ships, genres, etc.

Obviously the issues in this piece make it even more clear how hard it is to explain fandom and fanfiction to people who aren't part of it (and as Jemima points out, even we don't always understand it), and no matter how much the media wants to generalize, that's an impossibility because fandom is a fervent, talented, diverse and noisy group of people who form a community that changes and evolves with source material, fanon and discussion. There's no "one size fits all" and frankly, we like it that way.