Aram Zucker-Scharff

“I understand what you mean when you say your relationship with advertisers and developers is complex. But your readers, the people whose blogroll is occupied by your websites and then Reddit and 4chan and 9gag and on and on, they may not understand – or worse, they may misunderstand that relationship. This is where you need to spend time clarifying everything. You need to let some sunshine in on your operations so that no one can credibly accuse you of shady dealings again. This has the added bonus of lending some credence to the idea that games journalism is actually becoming more professional.”

– “Gamergate” and Media Ethics in Trade Writing.

“”While ostensibly a movement to “focus on corruption in gaming media,” it’s actually about the harassment of women and minorities and freelancers in an effort to cut off their voices from the gaming medium. It’s a thoroughly disgusting movement for many reasons, but there are a few well-intentioned people in among the hordes of people behaving in bad faith.””

– Traditionalism, Astroturfing, And Growth: How Games Are Changing.

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.”

Land of the free:

How Dreamcast’s pirates helped make the console legendary