Aram Zucker-Scharff

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“The main target of GamerGate is not a journalist. She’s a video game developer. […]

“If what you don’t like about gaming journalism is that it’s too cozy with the industry and therefore the writers are afraid to be critical, then your f*cking hero should be Anita Sarkeesian. She funded herself with Kickstarter and not industry money.

“One of the most important ideas when it comes to ethical journalism is that there’s a wall between advertising and editorial. Publications are not supposed to let the demands of advertisers dictate content. “

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– “GamerGate is an attack on ethical journalism.”

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“The sheer increase in the media’s — and by extension, the country’s — attention span when Ebola made its way across the Atlantic is staggering. According to a Pew Research Center poll, it outranked protests in Hong Kong, the Secret Service’s troubles and airstrikes against ISIS by the U.S. as the story Americans focused on the most. Thirty-six percent reported that they paid “very close” attention to the story, up from 25% in mid-August. By comparison, it also eclipsed other outbreak-related stories, including mad cow disease in Europe, MERS in the Middle East and swine flu in Mexico and the U.S.

“Us” versus “them.” For Carrilho, the nature of the Western media hysteria over Ebola underscores a more pernicious trend in how the West views the rest of the world. More than any other event in recent memory, the Ebola epidemic has brought to light America’s lingering and simmering fear of “the other.” The media circus is doing more than perpetuating the idea that America may become victim to a deadly epidemic — they’re implying the country’s very purity is at risk. “

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– One Powerful Illustration Shows Exactly What’s Wrong With How the West Talks About Ebola.

“But there was actually a sense of something even more troubling — a loss of control. Journalists don’t often say this out loud, but we do think there’s an element of art to what we do. And what do most artists want, as much if not more than money? Creative control. But permeating almost every session was a sense of desperation — at regaining some kind of control over how we connect and impact with our audience. The homepages that newsrooms have sunk countless dollars and person-hours into upgrading are already dying a rapid death. Increasingly, story traffic depends on the whim of the swipes — with faceless folks in the bowels of Silicon Valley, at Google and increasingly at the social media giants of Twitter and especially Facebook, exerting an inordinate amount of power. If there was one word that I heard more than “viral” at the ONA, it was “algorithm.” Facebook has completed coded the way that millions of would-be news consumers get information, and no one knows how to crack it.”

– Looking for the soul of journalism’s new machines at ONA2014.

Payola: I Sleep Beneath the Golden Hill | Sufficiently Human:

An excellent look at why what is happening in gaming journalism is relevant to the entire field of journalism:

“Because the pieces themselves are worth peanuts, I was expected to produce like 10 of them a day. That may not sound like a lot, but believe me, you start to feel like you’re on an assembly line they way these articles are cobbled together. And because your labour is valued based on what you’re producing and not what it takes to produce it, you quickly start to feel overworked and brutally underpaid (I was making about $200/mo). On the other hand, the system is kind of set up to seduce writers shouldering for visibility into jobs like this, producing an enthusiast press that is willing to work more or less for exposure. As a writer working in this system, you’re basically a low-level functionary with no leverage to seek information beyond what a publisher wants on record. Being able to gain access to these companies is fundamental for games press to exist, so editorial isn’t really in a position to demand very much most of the time. As such, you end up with a press that mostly operates like cheap PR.”