Aram Zucker-Scharff

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.”

Naked photos of Jennifer Lawrence: to click or not to click?:

From private photos to violent videos, the internet is full of degrading material intended to tempt viewers. Can we learn not to gawp, asks Stuart Jeffries

Putting on my internet studies hat, I’m finding the conversations that have been popping up around this fascinating. This is another sort of specific-to-general piece that takes a look at what our clicks mean, and don’t. 

“while we write objecting to the violation of Hollywood stars’ image rights and the abuse of their privacy, the internet carries on regardless making life more miserable for women and more degrading for men.

There’s something Canutish about Badham’s injunction not to click. It does little to address the herd of elephants in the room – the objectification of women’s bodies, the spread of misogyny that the internet has facilitated, the poison of online porn beyond Hugh Hefner’s wettest dreams, the real-world consequences for human relationships of the endless parade of naked bodies beyond Roger Ebert’s anti-puritanical hopes across computer screens.”

The homepage is dead, the section home page is dead, the app is dead and the social web has won—even at NYT. :

Traffic to the New York Times homepage fell by half in the last two years, according to the newspaper’s internal review of its digital strategy. Here’s the very stark chart: That’s not necessarily a reflection of any problems at the Times but the reality of how news is now distributed on the internet. Homepage traffic is declining at…

The new reality: news is all push, no pull.