[Levitz]

>I keep hearing this sentiment on HN and IRL. As a journalist I think it misses the mark somewhat by failing to account for the value of reporting.

There is valor added by journalists in even niche sectors. A journalist that reports on cars knows about the industry itself and can give an informed take on different developments, he might know how a car works, he might know about different trends in design, or markets, or whatever else. That is his added value.

When it comes to videogame journalism, though, they act as little more than spokespeople for corporations. They generally don't understand the product or how it works (mechanically or in terms of design), and in some cases aren't even adept at playing videogames themselves. The only thing the world would lose if no game journalist ever mentioned WoW again and the devs communicated directly with the playerbase would be the appearance of impartiality journalists give.

[edavison1]

I am hardly a luminary of my field but if you take a look at some of my features you’ll see they are drastically different from the idea you may have in your head.

Lots of folks more accomplished than me who hit way harder. All the coverage about crunch, for instance, or sexual harassment scandals at big companies—-these are topics broken by games journos.

If your only exposure to this world is shitty SEO spam or cleverly-disguised marketing, I could see why you’d think the way you do. But there is so much good games journalism out there. I don’t recommend writing off the field like that.

[Levitz]

> All the coverage about crunch, for instance, or sexual harassment scandals at big companies—-these are topics broken by games journos.

Sorry to be blunt but, that's not games. That's games journalists who want to be activists in their own fields. That, just as the gorillionth take on how this or that is problematic, is just people wanting to inject their politics into a hobby and it can't disappear soon enough.

I don't see that as an advantage of journalism. I see that as an evil to endure for a good that isn't there.

[edavison1]

How is exposing malfeasance and illegal corporate activity activism?

I hate to retreat into platitudes here but good journalism shines a light in the dark, it comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, that’s kind of the name of the game.

If you’d prefer these topics go unaddressed and companies continue to take advantage of their workers or whatever, not sure we have enough in common to have real discourse on the subject. Sorry to be blunt lol.

[Cheezewheel]

>All Game Journalists do is act as little more than spokespeople for corporations

>>Actually here Game Journalists also report on X, Y and Z

>Nah that is just people injecting politics and being activists

This is a pretty dumb "No true Scotsman" argument you are smuggling into the conversation here.

[bshacklett]

That’s the problem, though, isn’t it? The vast majority of content that people see is low effort garbage that is pushed by media companies that are just looking to make a quick dime off of advertising revenue, and that’s very easy to do with AI.

Ad-based “news” is always going to have this problem, because getting clicks just requires getting people to the page; the quality of the content doesn’t matter nearly as much as the headline. The incentives for quality content just don’t exist in the current business model.

Paywalls obviously aren’t the solution, either, because news is nothing, now if it can’t be shared, and paywalls stop that dead. It also takes time and effort to build a brand, as you rightly stated before. The other important factor is how easy it is to lose trust in that brand, which means high stringent and transparent fact checking needs to be a part of the solution, alongside _proper_ retractions when someone _does_ get it wrong.

The only way I can imagine things improving is for independent journalists to get together to ditch the big media outlets and find some real solution to monetizing their work and keeping everyone accountable to accurate reporting. Obviously that’s much easier said than done.