The blind eye of Kotaku and Joystiq

Published
by
Dan
on July 31, 2009
in Games
. Comments

Feel free to call bullshit on this post, but despite my admitted bias, I would like to hear other people’s thoughts on this one.

When I found out that OXM was going to break the news about 360 players using their Avatars in Guitar Hero 5, I realized it was also the perfect time to pay attention to some details. This is exactly the kind of small-but-significant info that the daily blog sites love to report on, so I wanted to see how long it would take between the arrival of our magazines in subscribers’ mailboxes and the appearance of this news on Joystiq and Kotaku. (I was particularly interested to see this after the last time that information from an OXM feature was mangled in transit en route to the blogs.)

The 100th issue of OXM with the GH5 Avatar story (and a blurb on the cover about that particular story element) hit subscribers roughly two weeks ago, and we’ve gotten a ton of reader mail about the issue already. However, Kotaku and Joystiq posted their GH5 Avatar stories just this morning. Why? Simple: They waited until the information came to them, in the form of a PR release and a video (in Kotaku’s case, a custom one). “Xbox 360 avatars will be able to jam in upcoming rhythm game Guitar Hero 5, Activision announced this morning,” reads Kotaku’s story. Well, there you have it: this is a story based on Activision’s press release. And even though the information was reported before Activision’s press release, the content was very clearly fresh news to the commenters.

When an OXM reader brought the print scoop up in the comments on Joystiq’s story, he was roundly shouted down, because on the internet, people don’t like to feel like someone else has more information than they do. Some suggested that OXM had the information first was irrelevant, and that OXM is not a valid news source to the readers of Joystiq. (Of course, that does not change the fact that OXM is a valid source of this information — if the audience accepts it when Joystiq reports the same thing that OXM reports, it’s a reader bias to suggest one is more valid than the other.)

So here’s my actual question: If your job as a “games journalist” is to seek out new and interesting tidbits about videogames, and you get paid by the tidbit…why are you limiting your sources? I would think it makes sense to subscribe to the last few print magazines out there and cull them for information. Instead, I generally see “news” on blogs when PR departments deliver it. It’s clearly what happened in this case.

So if the info is out there…why wait? If it was important enough to report today, surely it would have been important enough to report two weeks ago. Are the blogs being told not to report it until Activision says so? Or are the blogs not actually aware of news happening around them? Either one is bad.

Now, nobody can stay on top of everything, but reading enthusiast magazines on your specialized topic seems like a pretty easy (and dare I say occasionally enjoyable) way to stay on top of how information is being conveyed to different segments of your audience. Sometimes the mags are going to have gaming information later; sometimes they’re going to have it first. All you have to do is read them to stay aware of that ebb and flow. And maybe this is too obvious to mention, but you can blog about whatever you read. And then you get paid more, because those bloggers get paid based on post traffic. (The win for the print mag is that they are cited as a source…or, journo-ethically, should be. Hence my bias.) So, considering that we’re still talking about a form of information that comes to your mailbox as automatically as an e-mailed press release…why aren’t you subscribing?

Information gathering and research defines the role of the news media. If you are not actively seeking out sources of information, are you really a journalist?

UPDATE 8/11: Hello, Slashdotters. It’s probably worth reading the short followup post too.

  • Justin McElroy
    Hey Dan. I think you're making a good general point, as the blogs could do a better job of paying attention to what print publications are doing. But I think you're over-reaching in a couple of critical areas.

    For one, questioning whether or not bloggers are journalists because they missed a story in a magazine seems like a pretty big stretch. We've sourced OXM plenty of times, and try to always be fair about doing so. In fact, I think we did a pretty good job with the story you say got "mangled in transit": http://www.joystiq.com/2009/05/25/oxm-cover-sho.... We're constantly searching out new sources, and insinuating that we don't because we missed a story (that's not all that huge in the grand scheme) seems pretty judgmental.

    Also, speaking of journalism, I don't know what your source is for the "pay-for-traffic" thing, but they're lying to you. I can't speak for Kotaku, but we at Joystiq are paid the same no matter how well a post does.

    I'm not going to deny that there are some online media that see print media as outdated and vestigial, and I'll agree that that's a problem, especially when some mags are still doing high-quality work. But it feels, to me at least, that you're painting with a pretty broad brush.
  • Dan
    Fair enough Justin -- I'm calling Joystiq out and maybe I shouldn't, but yours is one of the two leading news sites for gamers, and I saw similar behavior from both in this case.

    My sources on the pay-per-traffic did not cite Joystiq so I should have been more explicit. And to my knowledge, Joystiq is the only news blog that has ever contacted me to confirm a story that involved OXM, which I really appreciated -- rather than running rumor, you guys emailed to check. I regularly see stories cited on Joystiq. And Joystiq was not one of the sites that mangled the Mass Effect "rumor" story; I named the names in that case. So I apologize for, as you accurately put it, painting with too broad a brush.

    That said...while it's isolated, this example is relevant; Joystiq didn't report on it until Activision released the info. I admit that it's weak with a single example, but I have seen it happen before, on multiple sites; at those times, I just got angry, let it simmer and dissipate -- I didn't document any of it. This is the one story I paid attention to so I could use it as a concrete example.
  • True dat.

    Also, I am really fucking sick of sites like Kotaku not citing the source for every single article. I don't care if it's a press release, I want to know.
  • Dan
    Well, that bugs me when it happens too, but Kotaku definitely did cite the source in this case -- it was Activision's press release. Kotaku was unaware that the information was in OXM in print two weeks prior and even unaware that it was on oxmonline.com the night before, with a nice big "exclusive" on it. An RSS feed could have told them that.

    And again, that's because despite having a significant number of editors, they are not working all their potential sources.

    This is not the first time I've seen it happen; this is just the first time I decided to make myself aware of the timeline of it happening so I could present my findings.
  • EvanL
    J and K don't generate a lot of original content. When they do, it's usually decent, like Totilo's "I'm taking word requests for Scribblenauts" thing yesterday. http://kotaku.com/5327438/scribblenauts-live-wo...

    I'm generalizing, but the closer these outlets get to being aggregators aggregating each other (here's a story from Digg, here's something Joystiq hit two days ago, here's the same trailer you saw on four other sites, here's a quote from an interview on another site), the less valuable they'll be to readers. And I think it honestly stems from straight-up laziness and poor editorial direction, on Kotaku especially. I feel like a lot of bloggers get into this cycle where, because they're paid independently based on hits and the site needs to update every half-hour or less, it's much easier to take an existing story and link to it than spend an hour recording and transcribing an original interview or drumming up a feature.

    When blogs get in this mode, they're essentially acting as gatekeepers for other outlets' content. Want to see the new L4D2 trailers featured on 1UP? Give us a pageview, and we'll direct you to them. It's a bad model that keeps people from (I'm speculating) being "permanent residents" on sites like Eurogamer, Gamasutra, Gamesindustry.biz, whatever, that have outstanding original content every day.
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