Sunday Thoughts: Personality

It’s actually pretty easy to be a journalist. All you really have to do is write a few words about your chosen subject, possibly regurgitating content from other journalists or press releases. Being a good journalist is a lot harder and takes a lot of different qualities working together. For me one of these is personality. A good journalist, in fact just a good writer, should be able to show some of their own personality in a piece. Does anyone really want to read completely bland, robotic pieces that could have been written by anyone at all or stitched together by a well programmed computer?

If you look at great print and broadcast journalists I really respect like Jeremy Paxman, Charlie Brooker or Andrew Marr they all have a huge amount of talent as writers or broadcasters, but they also always manage to bring through a lot of personality even when discussing serious subjects. There’s a very fine line to walk between adding personality and still treating a subject with the correct amount of seriousness when you’re dealing with relatively serious news, one that Charlie Brooker only just manages to skate even though he’s supposed to be a fairly light-hearted columnist.

Of course gaming journalists have it much easier when it comes to inject personality. At heart we’re just entertainment journalists. I don’t mean that to sound denigrating, but we write about games; it’s not like we’re covering developments in the Middle East peace process, or interviewing David Cameron. It’s easy to inject a bit of fun and personality when the topics you cover aren’t exactly earth shattering; there’s still a line to walk but it’s a much easier one to walk.

You only have to look at people like Jim Sterling, Jeff Gerstmann or even Jerry Holkins (although he’s more someone who writes about gaming than a journalist) to see just how much personality gets injected into game journalism, and it’s something I always try to add to my own pieces. By no means am I saying that I’m anywhere near close to the level of the writers I’ve talked about here, I certainly wouldn’t consider myself a great journalist by any measure. However I do try to make stuff humorous when appropriate and I think it’s one of my strengths. In fact I would imagine it’s one of the reasons that TSA decided to give me a shot.

For those of you who don’t know before I was a writer at TSA I did a podcast called Second Nature, I still do on the odd occasion. It also featured former TSA writer David Howard (now of MediaKick fame) and basically it was just us being us. We were once accused of using fake ‘over-the-top’ personalities to make the show more appealing, but it’s a pretty fair representation of how we behave with some ums and ahs added – it’s an odd effect that microphones seem to have. I’ve never really asked but I think the personality I displayed on the podcast was one of the reasons that TSA felt I might have what it takes and brought me into the fold.

Of course too much personality may be an issue for some people, in particular those who want to see gaming taken seriously. It’s hard to get the mainstream press to take games seriously when a lot of the writing about the subject seems very light hearted and crowded with in-jokes.

Perhaps it’s expecting too much for entertainment to be treated in such a serious manner, although other forms of entertainment have a balance between the entertainment side and the more serious side of things. For example films or books often get discussed as being culturally significant and as art, there are very few writers who treat games in the same manner. The medium might get a little more respect if more writers treated it that way, but I don’t know if it would make any real difference to games themselves. If the games aren’t changing then what’s the point?

I like to think that here at TSA we manage to walk the line between entertainment and covering gaming topics about right. I wouldn’t like to say anything so pretentious as to say the site as a whole has a personality in the writing that features, each writer has their own style and inflections that they use. I think we do a good job most of the time, how about you?