Jon Rose over at Insomnia thinks that the gaming media, mainstream and otherwise, has squandered their responsibility to readers to provide investigative journalism.
The thing to remember here is that the people with any sort of position in the media are, or at least were, editors of review mags or long-time reviewers, and as such are nothing but glorified reviewers themselves even when they hold journalism degrees. This is a really convenient place for them to be, too, since when they do something that comes close to being valuable they get to suck up that prestige, but when they fall short of what they could be it's "Hey, man, I didn't claim to be anything more". This is why I'm sick of Dan Hsu in particular: I can't think of anyone who is a bigger exemplar of this. Steve Bauman always came close with his industry-apologist viewpoints, but in any case the majority of those in the media have somehow gotten a loftier reputation than they deserve. And they've gamed it for all it's worth.
Harsh words. And it's not just the big players, either:
This is where blogs come in, but they've also proven useless. They get all this lip service as making print and even online institutions obsolete, but all I've seen them do is all the media has ever done. Interviews that don't ask anything anyone actually wants an answer to, and editorials that can, at BEST, air what a lot of us have already been murmuring for years. This would seem to be the check to the above situation, but they don't bother to be more than what they are themselves. In fact, most of the writers for popular blogs, instead of trying to create something to actually replace the broken old media, are still freelancing in it.
I am sympathetic to Jon's complaints. It's possible to view the gaming press (and why don't we just lump most mainstream press into this as well) as an extension of the industry's PR arm. I've personally enjoyed the freewheeling aesthetic that our editors at 61FPS have cultivated. I spend a lot of my time here moaning about the State of Things (softball journalism, press releases disguised as reviews, etc.) which might not possible at other blogs. It ain't all bad. At least Insomnia is there to provide a platform for disgruntled true believers.
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