In Part 1 I looked at how the decline of print journalism has been caused by a culture of instant gratification. Hopefully I demonstrated how that was bad for the industry as a whole and hopefully we found the green shoots of recovery in the places that are not so heavily “monetised” like the enthusiast sites and podcasts. This time around I want to look at a broader problem facing video game journalism:
Publisher and developer relations.
The problem is a simple one. The things that games journalists write about have to come from somewhere. The interesting stuff is unique rather than just the same news that everyone else is publishing. Things like interviews, reviews, previews, hands on features with upcoming titles and exclusives. These are all things which can’t be done without the co-operation of the publishers and developers.
So publishers and developers are our lifeblood. Without them we would have nothing to write about, or at least nothing that the rest of the internet and remaining print media (Good on you Game Informer – absorb that market share!) isn’t also writing about. This leaves journalists with an interesting dilemma. Do they just make stuff up for hits from the news aggregators or do they hunt down the interviews and exclusives?
The lazy ones make stuff up, post it to the news aggregators and watch the hits rattle in. That way might lead to revenue but I think it also leads to a blackened heart and a total lack of respect. The other option is to pursue that holy grail of games journalism; good publisher/developer relations.
Good relationships with the people who give you your subject matter makes life immeasurably easier for a journalist. If people like you they talk to you and often they talk to you first and you get a nice exclusive. At the thin end of the wedge are the press releases and review code. Without press releases a journalist is always last to the party, he (or she) has to get their news from someone else who gets the press release. Without review code a journalist has to buy the games to review which is cripplingly expensive and pretty soon puts them out of business.
So we need to keep our good relationships with the people who make games. Usually this is not a problem. Anyone I’ve ever had to deal with in the industry has been approachable, reasonable and understanding of the way things work. I hear the stories though, stories about journalists that review a game negatively and get frozen out by publishers. Writers who criticise the way developers go about their business only to find that their latest review code is lost in the post.
It only becomes an issue when industry sources try to play the system or when journalists attempt to raise a readership by being obstreperous. We all know writers who are critical for the sake of being critical. There is a rising trend in games journalism to be obtuse because it seems funny and raises readership. We also all know of writers that heap praise on projects, studios and publishers regardless of the inherent quality of those projects or organisations. Actually we are all guilty of it to some extent; we all have our favourite studios and industry people that we will favour. The problems arise when we favour them for the wrong reasons.
You’ve heard of instances when a journalist or a publication refrains from publishing a negative review so a game gets a decent opening-weekend metascore. At the thin end of that issue are the sites that go easy on a game because they need the next one as review code. You can also include the journalists that don’t want to offend their friends in the industry by criticising them or their studios. I would argue that those people are not really journalists at all.
Games journalism is, of course, just a micro example of the issues that face journalists of all types, in all niches and especially in the mainstream. As I discussed in Part 1 of this article, the world of journalism has changed to reduce the need for accountability in preference for immediacy and popularity no longer requires responsibility.
There is a famous quote from Joseph Pulitzer, journalism’s most famous son which reads:
I want to always fight for progress and reform; never tolerate injustice or corruption; always fight demagogues of all parties; never belong to any party; always oppose privileged classes and public plunder; never lack sympathy with the poor; always remain devoted to the public welfare; never be satisfied with merely printing the news; always be drastically independent; never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.
I think that if we all lived by those ideals then the industry would have more integrity and demand greater respect than it currently does. What about tackling the problem of manipulation from studios and developers? That’s where you, the reader, can make a difference. Hopefully the target audience will be able to differentiate between the writers with integrity and the ones that do what is expected of them in payment for the constant stream of cooperation.
I believe that only an educated readership, an honourable culture of journalism and an understanding industry will save us all from the quagmire of regurgitated manipulative marketing. It might take a revolution but I think we’re ready for that, I think it is already starting, here between you and me. We can change the world and all we have to do is change our reading habits.