Game Journalism 2009: The Continuing Plunge

[DennyA]

Now, I'm hardly the Grand Old Man of game journalism--that honor goes to Jeff Green, who will soon be celebrating his 87th birthday. But having written about games longer than Demon G Sides has been alive, a lot of what I see on today's game sites just makes me sad.

Ran across this this morning:
http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3172922
Ensemble's Bruce Kelley? Okay, now, the author was 7 when Civilization was released. And while they do teach you about basic fact checking in Journalism 101 class, few of today's professional writers have any training or journalism education. But this is just sloppy. Particularly since one mention in the article actually does say Shelley. Even when Hearst was the bastion of yellow journalism, they understood the need for copy editors.

Obviously just one example. But I see this lack of care and professionalism too frequently nowadays.

Meanwhile, Dana Jongewaard has a good article on some of my frustarations with game reviews:
http://www.greenpixels.com/articles/...-Opinions-Suck

Game journalism hasn't fallen from a height of perfection. (Fogeys pine for the days of CGW's 7-page reviews, but in reality, those could have benefited greatly from a serious swipe of the editorial hatchet.) But I do think there's a lack of care and quality control on many sites that was not nearly as prevalent in years past.

[Dean]

UGO laid off all of 1up's copy editors. You're seeing 20-somethings proofread by other 20-somethings who have their own wordcounts to fill.

[FoRmaT]

It's all about the Benjamins.

[Jeff Green]

[BlueJackalope]

Jesus H Face-Palm!

[DennyA]

Originally Posted by Dean

UGO laid off all of 1up's copy editors. You're seeing 20-somethings proofread by other 20-somethings who have their own wordcounts to fill.

The overwork is an excuse, but not the "20-somethings." I've known lots of 20-somethings who do thorough, enthusiastic, professional jobs. Sometimes even more so than the more experienced folks, since the 20-somethings aren't jaded, frustrated, disenchanted, or broken yet.

[Creole Ned]

I always liked your work in CGW, Benny.

(And I chuckled -- sadly -- when I saw the "Bruce Kelley" article on the GameTab page this morning. Where does "Kelley" even come from? It's obviously not a typo.)

[Ben Sones]

It could have been an accidental replacement in Word, if Kelley is in their dictionary and Shelley isn't. It seems unlikely that it was a fact-checking error, since the writer got it correct elsewhere in the piece. It's also not a very likely typo. Regardless (or irregardless, if you prefer), it's something that should have been caught by a copy editor.

[Jeff Green]

Originally Posted by Ben Sones

Regardless (or irregardless, if you prefer), it's something that should have been caught by a copy editor.

...which is why the layoff of all the copy editors was the most telling cock-up of the whole UGO/1up buyout.

[Dean]

Originally Posted by DennyA

The overwork is an excuse, but not the "20-somethings." I've known lots of 20-somethings who do thorough, enthusiastic, professional jobs. Sometimes even more so than the more experienced folks, since the 20-somethings aren't jaded, frustrated, disenchanted, or broken yet.

I mention the 20-something more because the error wouldn't jump right out at them the way it would to a Certified Old Fuck who came up on PC games and considers Bruce Shelley a household name like Sid Meier or Trip Hawkins.

[scharmers]

Originally Posted by Dean

I mention the 20-something more because the error wouldn't jump right out at them the way it would to a Certified Old Fuck who came up on PC games and considers Bruce Shelley a household name like Sid Meier or Trip Hawkins.

It's Sid Meyer.

blue pencil me, Denny!

[Jeff Green]

Originally Posted by Dean

I mention the 20-something more because the error wouldn't jump right out at them the way it would to a Certified Old Fuck who came up on PC games and considers Bruce Shelley a household name like Sid Meier or Trip Hawkins.

Getting people's names right in an article shouldn't be dependent on how old you are. And I'm not coming down on the writer for it, per se---every writer needs an editor and fact-checker. So does every professional website.

[caesarbear]

It's Gamespot so I shouldn't be surprised, but this one made me shake my head.

http://forums.taleworlds.net/index.p...c,57106.0.html

It's been removed now, however in a preview of the upcoming Mount & Blade expansion:

In terms of gameplay, there'll now be mounted archery for the first time, which looked intuitive from the video we were shown.

Also, particularly annoying to me, but less egregious I suppose:

Perhaps most surprisingly, the developer is going to consciously defy some of the criticism it has faced from fans...

How dare they defy the internets!

[Armando Penblade]

Of course, editors aren't everything: every writer needs to be as certain as possible about their facts and figures before sending things off to the red-pens.

Point in case: I'm a weekly humor columnist for my school paper, the Daily Free Press. I had a write-up about (fictional) things various colleges within the University could do to save money, riffing off the Communication school's decision to eliminate all paper by end-of-semester. One of those included having the Business school kids stop using paper money and switch entirely to credit cards.

My (fake) reasoning? All that paper money was printed on cotton, and without their insulating coats, all the sheep that provided the cotton to money-printers would expel their voluminous body-heat into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming and killing us all.

The whole sheep's wool = cotton mistake made it past the section editor, two copy editors, and the EiC before hitting print.

At least it was a humor column; most people assumed I was being an idiot and forgetting about, say, the cotton gin, on purpose :(

[Other Brendan]

Good copyeditors are a priceless resource, and far too rare in all fields of journalism these days. I used to write for a couple papers, and to this day, I have no idea how they caught some of my blunders. Hooray for people who save me from myself!

[extarbags]

What about good writers? What's the price of that resource?

[frank austin]

I wish I could give Kotaku the gift of copy editing.

[Aeon221]

Originally Posted by Jeff Green

Getting people's names right in an article shouldn't be dependent on how old you are. And I'm not coming down on the writer for it, per se---every writer needs an editor and fact-checker. So does every professional website.

Especially this one.

[Other Brendan]

Originally Posted by extarbags

What about good writers? What's the price of that resource?

You'd be surprised what a mediocre writer can do with a good editor and copydesk to support him. But given the state of games journalism today, maybe it would be best to focus on finding the people who have less need for a top-notch support staff.

[Coca Cola Zero]

Originally Posted by Ben Sones

It's also not a very likely typo.

Perhaps the person who wrote the copy knows someone whose name is Kelley. I often see people suggest that certain misspellings aren't likely to be typos because the wrong/right letters aren't close to each other on a keyboard, but the vast majority of my own typos aren't due to 'fat fingers' miskeying, but due to improper activation of muscle memory... I'll be typing something close to something else I type a lot more often and I'll just bang out the wrong sequence even if some of the letters are nowhere near the ones for what I really mean to type.

Anyway... IMO, typoing someone's name is like by far the least of "game journalism's" problems these days.

[Jeff Green]

I have my own long history of near-blunders that were mercifully caught by other eyeballs before hitting print. (As well as actual blunders that *weren't* caught---like misspelling Feargus Urquhart's name multiple times in an old CGW story on Black Isle. )

The bottom line is that no site even pretending to practice some form of "journalism" should be without copy editors. I mean--even one. If you're posting stuff online without someone vetting it any way first---congratulations, you're a blog!

[alexlitel]

Originally Posted by Jeff Green

The bottom line is that no site even pretending to practice some form of "journalism" should be without copy editors. I mean--even one. If you're posting stuff online without someone vetting it any way first---congratulations, you're a blog!

If Watergate were happening today or if blogging were around back then, Woodward and Berstein would be blogging the fuck out of it after running through an editor. False dichotomy.

[Jeff Green]

Originally Posted by Coca Cola Zero

Anyway... IMO, typoing someone's name is like by far the least of "game journalism's" problems these days.

Actually, I disagree. It's perfectly symbolic of the lack of professionalism that is the very reason everyone, like you, puts "game journalism" in quotes like this. Of course there are plenty of other problems. But if you can't even get the Journalism 1A stuff right, how can you expect anyone to take you seriously in the first place?

(And, again, I hate to make it seem like I'm bagging on the writer. I save my wrath for whoever the bonehead manager was who figured that copy editors were expendable.)

[Jeff Green]

Originally Posted by alexlitel

If Watergate were happening today or if blogging were around back then, Woodward and Berstein would be blogging the fuck out of it after running through an editor. False dichotomy.

I think you know what I meant. The crucial part is bolded above. If Woodward and Bernstein ran their pieces through an editor first, then that wasn't what I was talking about when I used the word "blog." I meant it as in: an informal online "diary."

We can say "unprofessional fanzine" if that makes you happier.

[Darniaq]

Originally Posted by alexlitel

If Watergate were happening today or if blogging were around back then, Woodward and Berstein would be blogging the fuck out of it after running through an editor. False dichotomy.

No, they'd be twittering it. In clipped abbreviated sentences.

Five years ago, yea, maybe a blog. With no copy editor. Because even then the average reader thinks the only difference between actual journalism and a blog is that they themselves didn't write the article.

Which sucks. There wouldn't be a downswing in quality and the ability for management to push the downswing if it wasn't for readers rewarding "first" instead of "good".

[DennyA]

Originally Posted by Other Brendan

You'd be surprised what a mediocre writer can do with a good editor and copydesk to support him.

Absolutely. In my first job, I was shocked to find out that I'd learned to program my Commodores not from a well-known author and really nice guy, but rather from a succession of his editors who did a great job translating his technically accurate articles into accessible, easily read pieces.

I also took great glee in editing Scott Card's columns. He made the same mistakes as the lowly non-novelists did.

[DennyA]

Originally Posted by Ben Sones

It could have been an accidental replacement in Word, if Kelley is in their dictionary and Shelley isn't.

Last time I checked, Word didn't automatically replace words.

And yes, it's a two-fold issue. A writer who didn't fact check her piece, and a website owned by a major national news corporation that doesn't feel its audience is worthy of having text copy-edited.

Not to harp too much on this one mistake (Bruce is admittedly less well-known than Sid to someone who's been writing about this stuff for fewer than five years), but it's endemic of a lack of care, pride, and process in today's publishing.

[Alex Handy]

A good editor should make a good writer sound like a great writer. Lord knows, all my editors make me sound smarter. Usually.

A good editor should also make the writer screaming mad from time to time.

The other thing is that most online stuff is 5 stories a day. That seriously degrades the quality of the writing. I like to think that any good writer has 1 good piece in them per day, maybe 2. More than that and they won't take the time to check and research.

All comes back to my recent rant on management. These MBA fuckheads come in and act like writers are word factories. Every word increases hit count. Hits = money from ads. Translation: more not better. WORK WORK WORK WORD SLAVES! And these assholes make 3 times what the writers do.

[Aeon221]

Originally Posted by Alex Handy

All comes back to my recent rant on management. These MBA fuckheads come in and act like writers are word factories. Every word increases hit count. Hits = money from ads. Translation: more not better. WORK WORK WORK WORD SLAVES! And these assholes make 3 times what the writers do.

Why are you mad at "MBAs" or "management" for "maximizing" "profits"? That's what they're supposed to do. I can see being pissed at them for making a poor call and firing all the copy editors, but making money?

It'd make more sense to be mad at humanity for preferring quantity and timeliness to quality. Not that that would make much sense either.

[Alex Handy]

Originally Posted by Aeon221

Why are you mad at "MBAs" or "management" for "maximizing" "profits"? That's what they're supposed to do. I can see being pissed at them for making a poor call and firing all the copy editors, but making money?

It'd make more sense to be mad at humanity for preferring quantity and timeliness to quality. Not that that would make much sense either.

I'm just upset at the idea that writers are facrtories on which little knobs can be turned to change the output of the company.

Totally wrong way to look at it.

This is endemic in almost all online media. Some understand, but most don't.

And to boot, as I am upset at my freelance career grinding to a halt thanks to dead budgets everywhere, can you spot the grammatical error in the FIRST FUCKING PARAGRAPH of this super duper high end magazine story?

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print...down-geography

Everything is falling apart.