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When will the title drop 'project'?


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I agree. What David Simon says about journalism is really good, I love watching his lectures.

 

I was interviewed at length at a Call of Duty eSports tournament by a local newspaper reporter. I gave them a lot of 'not for public knowledge stuff' and was interested in seeing what they would use for their story. When the story aired on TV they took something I said out of context to paint a picture of what they wanted to illustrate and it ended up being the exact opposite of what I was saying, hahah.

Edited by Sensuki
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To be fair, not all gaming journalists get paid *raises hand*, even in France. 

The small sites are not covering Eternity because they have scarce resources and they are better spent at AAA titles because those are the games which get you the clicks, which get you the advertising revenue you need to keep the site up and running. But then again, they can't grow because their target audience is better served via bigger sites which also have the resources to write more than just a few small daily news. 

 

The big sites don't cover Eternity, because they probably don't have an audience for it, as the AAA crowd usually doesn't care about Kickstarter games. I still meet gamers who have never heard of Kickstarter.

 

It's a vicious cycle, really.

Now now, don't get all defensive - I read the codex discussion about your disposition.

 

You have to agree that #1: Coverage of Josh Sawyer's presentation was poor and #2 (actually you might not have been around for this) the coverage of the Wasteland 2 Gamescom thing was also pretty shallow. Have you read this ?

 

 

This isn't the same discussion as in the Codex. I'm not being defensive. :) I'm simply stating the reasons for it. 

Of course the coverage was poor and of course the Wasteland 2 thing was shallow, I'm not debating that. But then again I'm a fan of RPGs, so I demand more detailed information. Fact is, most of gamers don't really care about those games. For general gaming journalists, those games are but a side note. Your free newspaper at the train station is probably also shallow about politics, whereas a specialized magazine on politics is probably a lot more detailed. What I'm trying to say: hardcore RPG fans are not the target group of any general gaming site. A normal reader simply doesn't care about the TB vs. RTwP debate and they don't care if there's XP for kills or not. That's why I said it's a vicious cycle. Those games are, from a gatekeeping-standpoint, almost irrelevant and their coverage is only a nice-to-have and not a must. While journalism certainly has the responsibility of informing people, journalism also has to be economic, especially now, where journalism is slowly dying. 

 

Also, I found Grunker's article a bit shallow in its analysis. While I agree that practices of gaming journalists are, most of the time, horrible and most of those guys can't even call themselves journalists. I fight of at the forefront against those kinds of guys and it's inconceivable for me to ever write a preview based on a trailer and I'm a harsh enemy of gaming PR. But to reduce the problem to the omniprescence of PR is an oversimplification that neglects all structural problems that are prevalent in any journalistic genre or in journalism in general for that matter. 

 

I find it important to understand that a lack of quality in journalism is not only associated with "bad journalists" and "evil PR", even though that's a schema which has a very strong narrative and is therefore a charming explanation, even if it's not the right one. I don't want to get to technical but people in journalistics are really, really not sure what all the exact problems are and how they really interact, as that strongly depends on the applied theory of research. But one thing everyone agrees with: PR is evil is an oversimplification (and a myth, even), which was proven by Barbara Baerns with her determination-thesis or rather by the criticism about her research.

 

 

tl;dr: there are things such as target audiences and gate-keeping and "PR is evil" and "most journalists are ignorant" are not the only explanation for lack of quality.

 

 

When the story aired on TV they took something I said out of context to paint a picture of what they wanted to illustrate and it ended up being the exact opposite of what I was saying, hahah

 

 

This is a very common occurence and is the result of the so-called "recontextualization" , which is a linguistic process of writing which is being explored with progressionanalysis. Of course there are bad journalists who design their stories before even talking to people, but mostly that happens when someone misinterprets what you say, or rather he simply understands it his way. I know, people on the codex hate me for not being objectivist, but really, everything you understand and hear, you understand with your brain and your ears and not some sort of objective brain-ear. Even if you say "The minister hastily gathered his material", that was already a totally subjective impression.

Edited by SophosTheWise
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This is a very common occurence and is the result of the so-called "recontextualization" , which is a linguistic process of writing which is being explored with progressionanalysis. Of course there are bad journalists who design their stories before even talking to people, but mostly that happens when someone misinterprets what you say, or rather he simply understands it his way. I know, people on the codex hate me for not being objectivist, but really, everything you understand and hear, you understand with your brain and your ears and not some sort of objective brain-ear. Even if you say "The minister hastily gathered his material", that was already a totally subjective impression.

No it was probably their editor's decision. The chick who was there on the day had enough material to make an interesting piece, but there were probably bigger & better stories to broadcast on the day and that one got pushed back to a 30 second closer.

Edited by Sensuki
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