N’Gai Croai, a videogame writer for Newsweek, posted about Jeff Gerstmann’s firing from Gamespot (allegedly over a bad review for Kane & Lynch: Dead Men that caused Eidos to pull ad money from Gamespot). It’s an interesting piece, though I’m not sure it’s entirely on the money.
Just to throw it out there, I have no personal stake in this matter – I don’t particularly like Jeff Gerstmann (I think he’s not a particularly good reviewer), and though I used to like Gamespot, recently, its quality has really gone downhill.
That said, N’Gai Croal’s position is that publishers hold the enthusiast press (Gamespot, IGN, and their ilk) in contempt, so they can strong-arm them into doing their will (by exerting pressure via advertising $$), where they couldn’t do that to a source they don’t hold in contempt (like Newsweek). Rather, they can’t do that to a site they’re not spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on in advertising.
But the fundamental point is this:
OF COURSE they hold these outlets in contempt.
OF COURSE THEY DO.
Do you think the Bush administration thinks well of the current White House press corps? The “enthusiast media” sites are all so fundamentally corrupted by the ad money they take in that there’s simply no way they’re not obviously under the publishers’ thumbs. They blather on and on about “editorial independence” but come on – it’s obviously bullshit, and has been for years.
These “enthusiast” sites, because they don’t actually do *journalism*, rely entirely on what publishers feed them. They need the publishers to spoon-feed them their content, so when they get anything, they sycophantically praise it in the hopes they’ll get more. Every “exclusive” you see comes with strings attached, spoken or unspoken. Every bad review a highly-anticipated game gets, the less content that review site gets in the next cycle.
These sites are so obviously, so totally corrupt due to their dependence on the publishers both for their ad money and their content that it’s simply impossible to consider any of them even marginally “independent” or “unbiased.” Sure, I read some of them periodically to see what kinds of things people are being told, but do I think for a second that any of them are *honest*?
Don’t make me laugh.
Oh – one thing that got lost – I don’t think N’Gai’s *wrong*, when I say he’s not on the money. It’s that I think his conclusion that publishers hold the enthusiast media in contempt isn’t quite right. It’s not contempt – it is literally that the big publishers see them as their lapdogs that they can make do whatever they want.
And for the most part, they can. That’s why I tend towards the more “blog-like” videogame media these days. They tend to be part of larger networks that take ad money from a wider variety of sources, they’re not as much “part of the machine” as the larger sites (though as publishers wake up to their popularity, that will become more and more of a problem), and the writers’ personalities and identities are more upfront, which makes them a little more personally accountable for the content.