Robert Florence stepped down from Eurogamer after writing the following on journalists & PR.

Well, I for one support sending them to war zones to cover gaming.

I remain convinced that there isn't that much journalism to be done about games yet, because they're fundamentally just not that interesting. Because there's so little to actually write true content about, most of the industry is reduced to shilling, because there isn't much else to do.

There's certainly some to be done, and I see a surprising amount of it right here on GWJ, but there is nowhere near enough meaningful content to support gaming journalism at the size that it pretends to be. Most of it just PR.

rabbit's upcoming piece on sparkle ponies will qualify as journalism because its audience paid for his copy and pushed funding for the piece. So, GWJ will get an in-depth, completely ethically sound coverage of... ...Mystery of the Secret Crystals.

So the word libel is being tossed about now. And that is a big deal in the UK.

http://penny-arcade.com/report/edito...

Wainwright, in a tweet, stated that she had no issue with the “idea and content” behind the story, just the “libelous comments” about her that were “unfair and unjust.” In the UK the word “libel” is incredibly loaded, and libel suits can prove incredibly damaging to publications and individuals. Wainwright has since changed her Twitter account to private, blocking anyone from reading her present or past tweets.
KingGorilla wrote:

So the word libel is being tossed about now. And that is a big deal in the UK.

Specifically a reference to the fact that UK libel laws are fairly draconian and can bankrupt an ordinary citizen through costs even if they win. Big news over here in recent years with lots of companies using UK Libel law to silence critics.

LarryC wrote:

rabbit's upcoming piece on sparkle ponies will qualify as journalism because its audience paid for his copy and pushed funding for the piece. So, GWJ will get an in-depth, completely ethically sound coverage of... ...Mystery of the Secret Crystals.

That's Secret of the Magic Crystals, mister. Duuuuuh.

Clearly, I have not been sufficiently informed. That's why we need a journalist to go in depth about this piece of gaming news!

Maq wrote:
KingGorilla wrote:

So the word libel is being tossed about now. And that is a big deal in the UK.

Specifically a reference to the fact that UK libel laws are fairly draconian and can bankrupt an ordinary citizen through costs even if they win. Big news over here in recent years with lots of companies using UK Libel law to silence critics.

Any particular reason why you are moving to the land of Reindeer?

Well it gets worse. People have sued international critics/press/bloggers for libel in the UK, gotten default judgments and will catch them at Heathrow Airport if they are foolish enough to fly out, in all likelihood with limited knowledge of the suit. It is as much an issue of how service of papers works in the UK as the libel laws themselves.

But regardless, it is something that really makes ears prickle among European and UK writers.

OG_slinger wrote:

So you've never accepted a preview version or free copy of a game for review?

I have. I also make it clear to the company the review will be honest and we will not review to their deadline. The review is done when it's done and they have no influence over our opinion. Not negotiable.

At the start of each review, I say that the game was a review copy and did not pay for it. I hope listeners understand that there's a chance of bias and treat the review with suitable skepticism.

OG_slinger wrote:

You've never attended a media event where you've gotten transpo, food, or lodging comped entirely or in part by the publisher?

No. I'm as wary of press junkets as anyone.

OG_slinger wrote:

And you've never had to go through a PR contact in order to get an interview with a game developer or executive?

I'd say no, but you decide.

I got hold of Mitch Gitelman, previously of FASA and then head of first party development for XBLA, by tracking him down on Facebook. He put me in touch with his PR people, but nothing happened. So I got back in touch with him and he got things sorted.

I got hold of Trip Hawkins - he founded EA - because I'd introduced myself to him in a corridor a few years beforehand.

Here is the thread: http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/1...

Recently, I changed the line I say at the end of the recording. It used to be 'Thanks for listening and we'll speak to you next time'.

Now it's 'Thanks for listening. And remember, do your own research and draw your own conclusions'.

Oh, and here's a line from an INternal email about our guidelines I sent to the crew.

'No gaming news - it's PR bullsh*t and you can't know what a product is like before it's released.'

EDIT:

I added the whole paragraph about gaming news. I realise... Well. I think I had to be honest about my opinion and use the full quote.

EDIT:

Gone back to shortened paragraph.

OG_slinger wrote:

[Ebert] has journalistic training and experience that is clearly not common among the gaming media.

It's not common in a lot of sectors these days, especially online. It's not just lack of training in journalistic ethics, it's lack of supervision. I know there's not really money out there to keep real vets around to help bring up the new class, but I wonder if there wasn't also a sort of abandonment of younger genrations by those who wrote off the internet. That may just be my feeling because I take very seriously my role as editor here, knowing that a lot of GWJ writers come in fairly green and untrained when it comes to these issues. If we are going to continue to be a place where great writers start out, I feel I have a responsibility to mentor, coach and train them. But I know GWJ couldn't afford to pay me a real rate or salary to do this.

Regardless, I think what's really needed is editors to guide writers and set policy. A couple good sets of policies have already been linked in this thread. I'm considering drafting a public page for our GWJ ethical policies. We'll see how that pans out.

OG_slinger wrote:

The problem I have is with people pretending there's such a thing as gaming journalism. Although he's been trained as a journalist, Ebert isn't a journalist. He's a critic. But he's a professional critic. And that's far, far removed from the gaming media mentioned in the articles.

I think you're splitting semantic hairs here. A lot of people hold eccentric personal definitions for "reviewer," "critic," "journalist," "reporter," and other terms. To my mind, journalism means you do content work for a periodical of some fashion. It's a term and profession that's been derided since at least Emerson, almost as long as critics have been hated.

Hollowheel wrote:
KingGorilla wrote:

3. Lionizing past journalism is folly and romanticizing a fiction. Walter Cronkite was a great journalist. But even in the 60's he was 1 of hundreds, thousands. Walter Cronkite is what we choose to remember from that era. Not the inumerable hacks that were his contemporaries. And we remember Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow because of the history they talked about, much more than the men themselves.

I pretty much agree with everything you've said but this. While it is true that there were hacks in every era, the mid-to-late 90s onward brought on a resurgence of non-objective and yellow journalism that would not have flown in the 70s and 80s (at least, not in the papers that mattered). Sure, maybe you can only look to post WWI to the the late 80s, but there are periods in which the journalism profession adhered more closely to it's storied idealism.

The shift you recognize was the shift away from pretending to be objective. Let me say this now: No human is objective. Can't be done. We can, however, be honest about our known potential biases, and that's where disclosure comes in. Most professional periodicals and journalistic organizations have rules about disclosure, usually including a cash value amount above which gifts from PR or others either must be disclosed or may not be accepted. I've had to talk to some of our own writers about this, too. You may think something doesn't bias you, but 1) you may well be wrong, and 2) if readers might doubt you, you're going to wish you had disclosed it rather than commit what will appear to have been a cover-up.

garion333 wrote:

Well, I for one support sending them to war zones to cover gaming.

Like this?

I dunno wordsmyth. Dare we get into what the "Fairness Doctrine" was?

OG_slinger wrote:
OzymandiasAV wrote:

But I strongly disagree with the idea that there are no journalists in gaming. It's not Deep Throat, but Patrick Klepek's reporting on Project IceBreaker at GiantBomb is a great example of investigative journalism in gaming media; Frank Cifaldi at Gamasutra broke the news that Zynga dumped 100 employees earlier this week.

So investigative journalism now consists of looking at Twitter posts or reading emails (admittedly weeks later) that were sent by another PR rep?

No wonder you're so utterly convinced that gaming journalism doesn't exist - you apparently don't read the articles. Yes, there were publically-available materials for these stories, but both reporters chased after related internal documents and followed up with multiple sources to confirm the veracity of those stories.

Though, to be fair, my sentence about Klepek was poorly worded. I included Giant Bomb as a nod to Klepek's current home, but it's not where the majority of the reporting surrounding the West/Zampella story took place.

Then again, if you had actually bothered to read the entire Giant Bomb piece, you would have already known that.

KingGorilla wrote:

I dunno wordsmyth. Dare we get into what the "Fairness Doctrine" was?

Fairness Doctrine was symptomatic of the delusion that objective reporting could be achieved. I actually think that, in a culture where news media claim objectivity, some action should be taken. Ideally, the action should be to educate audiences against the notion of objectivity, but that takes a while and costs money.

Well Fairness Doctrine went even beyond that to a bizarre idea of objectivity. It mandated false dichotomies. If something was political or of public relevance you had to give mention of all sides as equal-this includes race, gender relations, also when it came to science and medicine.

I think striving for objectivity is great. I think a better and more realistic goal is impartiality. You acknowledge your prejudices and biases, but weigh factors on their own merits.

More to the point. Even if the FCC stopped mandating it in the 80's. TV, radio often still operates on that doctrine internally.

I think striving for objectivity is great.

I think it's a dangerous lie to one's self and one's audience.

wordsmythe wrote:
garion333 wrote:

Well, I for one support sending them to war zones to cover gaming.

Like this?

Ha! Perfect.

Clearly this article was written because the Iranian government's PR rep sent him a free game.

garion333 wrote:
wordsmythe wrote:
garion333 wrote:

Well, I for one support sending them to war zones to cover gaming.

Like this?

Ha! Perfect.

Clearly this article was written because the Iranian government's PR rep sent him a free game.

Her.

wordsmythe wrote:
garion333 wrote:
wordsmythe wrote:
garion333 wrote:

Well, I for one support sending them to war zones to cover gaming.

Like this?

Ha! Perfect.

Clearly this article was written because the Iranian government's PR rep sent him a free game.

Her.

Pfft. Girls don't play video games.

Video game critics are writing book reports about toys. There isn't much journalism they can do and a lot of them don't have the education and/or background to do. I groan whenever I read an article or a tweet from a games writer about finance. Drives me batty.

wordsmythe wrote:
Hollowheel wrote:
KingGorilla wrote:

3. Lionizing past journalism is folly and romanticizing a fiction. Walter Cronkite was a great journalist. But even in the 60's he was 1 of hundreds, thousands. Walter Cronkite is what we choose to remember from that era. Not the inumerable hacks that were his contemporaries. And we remember Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow because of the history they talked about, much more than the men themselves.

I pretty much agree with everything you've said but this. While it is true that there were hacks in every era, the mid-to-late 90s onward brought on a resurgence of non-objective and yellow journalism that would not have flown in the 70s and 80s (at least, not in the papers that mattered). Sure, maybe you can only look to post WWI to the the late 80s, but there are periods in which the journalism profession adhered more closely to it's storied idealism.

The shift you recognize was the shift away from pretending to be objective. Let me say this now: No human is objective. Can't be done. We can, however, be honest about our known potential biases, and that's where disclosure comes in. Most professional periodicals and journalistic organizations have rules about disclosure, usually including a cash value amount above which gifts from PR or others either must be disclosed or may not be accepted. I've had to talk to some of our own writers about this, too. You may think something doesn't bias you, but 1) you may well be wrong, and 2) if readers might doubt you, you're going to wish you had disclosed it rather than commit what will appear to have been a cover-up.

I disagree. The shift had more to do with less obvious changes in things like sourcing, editorial oversight and circulation number pandering (damn you internet!). While it is impossible be truly objective, it is possible through proper editorial guidelines (using multiple sources, quoting both sides, fact checking,etc.) to ameliorate reporter bias (and newspaper, and new channel). In the mid-90s, the Society of Professional Journalists officially dropped "objectivity" from their ethics guidelines. I don't think that it's a coincidence that journalism has been spiraling downward ever since.

Maybe what game journalism needs is some...

OzymandiasAV wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:
OzymandiasAV wrote:

But I strongly disagree with the idea that there are no journalists in gaming. It's not Deep Throat, but Patrick Klepek's reporting on Project IceBreaker at GiantBomb is a great example of investigative journalism in gaming media; Frank Cifaldi at Gamasutra broke the news that Zynga dumped 100 employees earlier this week.

So investigative journalism now consists of looking at Twitter posts or reading emails (admittedly weeks later) that were sent by another PR rep?

No wonder you're so utterly convinced that gaming journalism doesn't exist - you apparently don't read the articles. Yes, there were publically-available materials for these stories, but both reporters chased after related internal documents and followed up with multiple sources to confirm the veracity of those stories.

Though, to be fair, my sentence about Klepek was poorly worded. I included Giant Bomb as a nod to Klepek's current home, but it's not where the majority of the reporting surrounding the West/Zampella story took place.

Then again, if you had actually bothered to read the entire Giant Bomb piece, you would have already known that.

I read the Giant Bomb article. It was written entirely from the court filings, which Klepek didn't even find on his own. Worse, it was emailed to him by a PR firm working for West and Zampella's law firm. Klepek admits that he only attempted to contact Activision's lawyers, but made no mention of all the people an actual journalist would attempt to contact to get to the bottom of the story real story: everyone from Activision's marketing department, to the CEO, to quiet emails and calls to all the other sources within the company that a real journalist would have built relationships with.

Hell, he didn't even contact West and Zampella to ask them why their law firm's PR agency would send them the filing and get them pony up a quote for the article that come from the deposition.

That isn't journalism. That's being manipulated.

The Gamasutra article is a bit closer to journalism, though it lacks the basic "who, what, when, where, why" that a real reporter would include. There's no mention of the actual source of the information anywhere in the article. Now compare that to the Forbes version of the article. See, they actually got in touch with him to confirm the story because that's a journalism 101 thing. They also properly attribute the speculation about layoffs at other offices to him so the reader can decide for themselves whether to believe it instead of just claiming that "rumors are circulating" like Gamasutra did.

Those two examples simply show that game media really aren't journalists not only because of what they wrote, but also because those stories should have been spiked by their editors.

Hollowheel wrote:
wordsmythe wrote:
Hollowheel wrote:
KingGorilla wrote:

3. Lionizing past journalism is folly and romanticizing a fiction. Walter Cronkite was a great journalist. But even in the 60's he was 1 of hundreds, thousands. Walter Cronkite is what we choose to remember from that era. Not the inumerable hacks that were his contemporaries. And we remember Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow because of the history they talked about, much more than the men themselves.

I pretty much agree with everything you've said but this. While it is true that there were hacks in every era, the mid-to-late 90s onward brought on a resurgence of non-objective and yellow journalism that would not have flown in the 70s and 80s (at least, not in the papers that mattered). Sure, maybe you can only look to post WWI to the the late 80s, but there are periods in which the journalism profession adhered more closely to it's storied idealism.

The shift you recognize was the shift away from pretending to be objective. Let me say this now: No human is objective. Can't be done. We can, however, be honest about our known potential biases, and that's where disclosure comes in. Most professional periodicals and journalistic organizations have rules about disclosure, usually including a cash value amount above which gifts from PR or others either must be disclosed or may not be accepted. I've had to talk to some of our own writers about this, too. You may think something doesn't bias you, but 1) you may well be wrong, and 2) if readers might doubt you, you're going to wish you had disclosed it rather than commit what will appear to have been a cover-up.

I disagree. The shift had more to do with less obvious changes in things like sourcing, editorial oversight and circulation number pandering (damn you internet!). While it is impossible be truly objective, it is possible through proper editorial guidelines (using multiple sources, quoting both sides, fact checking,etc.) to ameliorate reporter bias (and newspaper, and new channel). In the mid-90s, the Society of Professional Journalists officially dropped "objectivity" from their ethics guidelines. I don't think that it's a coincidence that journalism has been spiraling downward ever since.

I, too, disagree. What you claim is a downward spiral, I see as the combination of false nostalgia and a removal of the curtain hiding subjective journalism (not just reporting) which had always existed. Journalism, as KingGorilla points out, was never as good as we may want to believe it was. Oftentimes it was worse than we realized, as it cloaked itself in the pretense of objectivity. It may seem worse now, but I might go so far as to argue that the obviousness of subjectivity in today's journalism (again, not just news) makes for the final product to actually be better. At least now a good deal of readers and viewers know that it's Kool Aid.

OG_slinger wrote:
OzymandiasAV wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:
OzymandiasAV wrote:

But I strongly disagree with the idea that there are no journalists in gaming. It's not Deep Throat, but Patrick Klepek's reporting on Project IceBreaker at GiantBomb is a great example of investigative journalism in gaming media; Frank Cifaldi at Gamasutra broke the news that Zynga dumped 100 employees earlier this week.

So investigative journalism now consists of looking at Twitter posts or reading emails (admittedly weeks later) that were sent by another PR rep?

No wonder you're so utterly convinced that gaming journalism doesn't exist - you apparently don't read the articles. Yes, there were publically-available materials for these stories, but both reporters chased after related internal documents and followed up with multiple sources to confirm the veracity of those stories.

Though, to be fair, my sentence about Klepek was poorly worded. I included Giant Bomb as a nod to Klepek's current home, but it's not where the majority of the reporting surrounding the West/Zampella story took place.

Then again, if you had actually bothered to read the entire Giant Bomb piece, you would have already known that.

I read the Giant Bomb article. It was written entirely from the court filings, which Klepek didn't even find on his own. Worse, it was emailed to him by a PR firm working for West and Zampella's law firm. Klepek admits that he only attempted to contact Activision's lawyers, but made no mention of all the people an actual journalist would attempt to contact to get to the bottom of the story real story: everyone from Activision's marketing department, to the CEO, to quiet emails and calls to all the other sources within the company that a real journalist would have built relationships with.

Hell, he didn't even contact West and Zampella to ask them why their law firm's PR agency would send them the filing and get them pony up a quote for the article that come from the deposition.

That isn't journalism. That's being manipulated.

The Gamasutra article is a bit closer to journalism, though it lacks the basic "who, what, when, where, why" that a real reporter would include. There's no mention of the actual source of the information anywhere in the article. Now compare that to the Forbes version of the article. See, they actually got in touch with him to confirm the story because that's a journalism 101 thing. They also properly attribute the speculation about layoffs at other offices to him so the reader can decide for themselves whether to believe it instead of just claiming that "rumors are circulating" like Gamasutra did.

Those two examples simply show that game media really aren't journalists not only because of what they wrote, but also because those stories should have been spiked by their editors.

This is a real differentiation, and I'm glad it's been made. I think what you're seeing here is partly the difference between a slimmed-down but still mostly functional journalistic apparatus (Forbes) and rather ad-hoc, bare-bones writing. IIRC, Forbes has cut back on things like dedicated copyeditors (who were traditionally responsible for fact checking, unless there was a dedicated fact-checker), but there are also a number of other positions in a traditional periodical that not only check facts, style, grammar, etc., but that also could have stepped in at other times in the course of this whole spectacle and its fallout. Again I note that even respectable publications have been cutting back on these over the course of the century thus far, but these are people who could have been able to mitigate or prevent apparent breaches of ethics, temper and tighten Florence's article, approve and defend Florence's allegations, and manage the response to allegations, any of which could have made this a less ugly affair than it was. To the extent that people do exist in these roles for the actors involved in last week's show, I am perfectly willing to believe that any failure on their part to step in was due largely to being overworked and underpaid. And I won't blame places like EuroGamer for that, either. Margins in niche journalism such as games writing are incredibly thin, and there's little time or money lying around to fund the editing apparatus.

Ideally, I think a publication would be much more like we see of the modern military, with a significantly larger proportion of "support staff" to those on the front end. Paying for all that support staff, however, is another matter.

Well wordy. I am not even exactly sure if it is about needing all of those people anymore. This goes beyond word processing, editing, printing and into automation of thought, to a degree. In a world of google news, how much fact checking is needed? It then becomes more about corroboration-look up Justin Bieber has Leukemia to see why.

In my world, the major legal writing depositories Thompson West and Lexis offer a wonderful tool by which you upload a brief that is either your own or opponent, and it will do a search based on citations to look for whether the cases are still "good law" (IE not over-ruled, or if they are dated and no longer followed, etc.). Even 15 years ago, you had an assistant or paralegal going page by page, confirming with old Citators like Shepherds for this.

We also get into something about older time news. Older news worked hard to be the first, often only organization in posession of facts themselves. Big money lawsuits have been waged and won over having a copyright on certain factual information. So who fact checks exclusive information? We had bugged newswires, paying off librarians, paying off staff. Dare you take that information out into the world? Dear god, the number of suits over the phone book are staggering, and you cannot get more barebones factual than names and numbers.

And now we also move on. In an internet age. Facts are no longer really worth the effort and time to print. Facts and new information comes from Twitter, not from the Times. That is not exactly stopping the newswires from fighting that trend. How do you sell the facts, that everyone gets for free elsewhere from Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook?

Initially, it sounded like Lauren Wainwright was taking poor advice and had gotten swept up in a bunch of weird legal momentum. Increasingly, it's beginning to sound like the whole thing was her idea, and that she's been prosecuting it pretty vigilantly. I've seen some suggestions that focusing on Wainwright takes attention away from the real issue at hand, but I don't see why we can't discuss both. People are allowed to make mistakes, but this is looking less like a mistake and more like a calculated and cynical maneuver.

http://penny-arcade.com/report/edito...

Ulairi wrote:

Video game critics are writing book reports about toys.

I gave some thought to this elegant trivialization of an endeavour I've undertaken in the past, trying to think of examples in other areas. Is automotive journalism not essentially the same? Maybe the price of the "toys" involved differentiates the perceived status of the people writing about them.

We can write about people, about entities, but ultimately the focus (and I daresay the interest of the readers) is on things, the products produced. Some of us are fascinated by the making of the sausage, but 99% of folks just want their sweet, sweet sausage and to be told how yummy the next sausage will be.

I think OG holds a high standard for the word "journalism" if he thinks PR influence essentially disqualifies use of the term. I reckon 90% of most "real journalism" is directed by some company or companies' PR efforts. That's the way journalism is. A journalist who refuses to work with PR people won't last long in the industry.

I think OG's standards are unrealistic or utter fantasy. Everyone writes for some reason. That agenda may or may not be obvious, but it is rarely purely for the purpose of informing the world at large about information in exactly the way every single one of them would like to have it. Having an agenda as obvious and transparent as a PR connection is probably as innocent as it'll ever get.