Part of the problem with the lack of journalism in gaming journalism is that a lot of gaming sites – mine included – mix commentary and humor with news. People seem to have this impression that it’s okay to joke around on your blog, but once you’re a “real” site you need to straighten up and start behaving like a J-school professional.<\/p>\n
It’s not clear where the line should be drawn, and ignores the fact that many sites grow gradually into larger ones, and that they often get big because of their lack of professionalism. There’s often this disconnect with blogs: The writer sees it as a conversation with friends, and the readers think of it as a hobby news site. The writer is wanting to comment and gossip, but once a site gets so big the readers start expecting journalism. I think this is a cultural problem, mostly. We haven’t had something like blogs before, and so in many cases people are still working out what to expect from them.<\/p>\n
(This is even more true in the political arena. Web surfers will think nothing of stumbling onto some random small-fry political wonk and demanding<\/strong> that the author familiarize themselves with Dr. Humphrey J. Poncebottom’s 700 page tome, “A Treatise on Regionalism and Steel Tariffs in 16th Century France” before they have the audacity to complain about the cost of canned soda.)<\/p>\n But this serves as a good launching point for something I’ve wanted to say for a while now…<\/p>\n I divide the gaming press into three broad groups. Starting from the bottom:<\/p>\n 1. Blogs<\/strong><\/p>\n The bottom-feeders are blogs like this one. No real journalism, and no pretense of being such. It’s all reviews, commentary, op-ed, and webcomics down here at this end of the food chain. I’ve said before that people like me are information parasites. We ingest gaming news and excrete a waste product known as opinion editorials. Blogs are, essentially, entertainment. Once in a while a blogger gets a scoop, scores some insider info, or gets an interview, but for the most part we’re just making observations and repeating stuff we read elsewhere. <\/p>\n Anway, I sometimes get proud of the community we have here. Hey, this site scores over a million pageviews a month. I must be doing pretty well, right? <\/p>\n But if I ever want a dose of humility, I need only look up at…<\/p>\n 2. News Sites<\/strong><\/p>\n The next tier are the mid-range sites. There’s at least an order of magnitude difference in reach between a large blog like mine and one of these news sites. Places like Kotaku<\/a>, Rock Paper Shotgun<\/a>, Destructoid<\/a>, and the above-mentioned Joystiq<\/a>, as well as my fellow crimefighters at The Escapist<\/a>. <\/p>\n (It confuses things somewhat that many of them use a blog format, and so defining them becomes a bit tautological: They’re second-tier news sites because they’re in the second tier!)<\/p>\n These sites do a mixture of news and entertainment. This is where I get my gaming news and this is where all of the interesting discussions happen. These sites tower over blogs, although they are nothing compared to…<\/p>\n 3. The Whores<\/strong><\/p>\n Sites like IGN<\/a> and Gamespot<\/a> are the 800 pound gorillas of gaming journalism. The gap between the News Sites and the Whores is another order of magnitude. It really is interesting how neatly the sites break into discernible bands like this when you graph them. IGN and Gamespot are neck-and-neck, and they tower above the news sites who are all basically clustered together. <\/p>\n
![<a href=\"http:\/\/www.alexa.com\/siteinfo\/gamespot.com?p=tgraph&r=home_home\">Alexa<\/a> only lets you graph five sites at a time, but if I added Rock Paper Shotgun, The Escapist, Destructoid, and Blue’s News, they would all end up more or less overlapping the lines at the bottom.](https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/alexa_all.jpg "<a href=\\"http:\/\/www.alexa.com\/siteinfo\/gamespot.com?p=tgraph&r=home_home\\">Alexa<\/a> only lets you graph five sites at a time, but if I added Rock Paper Shotgun, The Escapist, Destructoid, and Blue’s News, they would all end up more or less overlapping the lines at the bottom.")
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