http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/11/28/I'm sure there are a lot of readings about this out there. Let me cover a specific example on a topic you may not find serious journalism. Videogames. But those of us who rely on professionals before we invest time and money into our game choices find these guys and gals invaluable. Regardless of your sympathies for the topic, there should be integrity in reviews. One of my early days in SFU (university) , it was already stressed to us that it's hard to produce quality news when you also have to attract viewers and advertisers. This scenario is exactly what they warn against.
Croal from Newsweek (quoted below) uses movie situations and quotes to make his point and so will I. Though not a classic at the level of Godfather or Network , Perfect Stranger with Bruce Willis and Halle Berry will suffice for my point. Opening scene Berry's character tries her hardest to expose a political scandal. Then the editor buries the story because of a sponsor issue. That's how I remember it.
Depending on what you believe, this is almost every underdog vs. The Man movie you have seen. At least the story line. I will let the links, text and videos tell the story of Jeff for you. I have been a Gamespot reader since 1998, when I first became an Internet user. A few years ago I was even active on the message boards under the name innagadda.
One of these days I will do more articles on podcasts since they are something I enjoy hours each day. I first got into them late 2005. A few months later I realized Gamespot had one and I really enjoyed their weekly show. Guess who was the anchor of the Gamespot podcast?
Reviewing Call of Duty 4 is not the same as Woodward and Bernstein breaking Watergate I get that. But this is a real life conflict of interest where putting to words how one feels about a subject clashes with the fact that subject is giving your employer cash for a totally different service. Videogames are trivial. Yet its the love for what they do that causes this story to be covered and cared for the way it is. And also gives me a chance to give you a case study about journalism ethics and integrity.
When this hit the fan 13 months ago as you can imagine co workers of Jeff, competitors of Jeff and videogames fanatics as a whole were enraged and wanted answers. It's been a year and I still read and listen to Gamespot but I am more cynical if that's possible.
As for Jeff he has since resurfaced here. A few other Gamespotters that help make the show what it was also left the site for whatever reason and some are currently with Jeff in the new place.
Responsible journalism is a force that helps keep the Marxist/ Leninist/ Socialist among us at bay. If you want to read a more profound, practical and yes scary take on journalism that matters beyond polygons and gaming consoles I have this piece that you might find interesting.
Ed
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/levelup/archive/2007/12/05/reflections-on-videogame-publisher-and-employer-contempt-towards-the-enthusiast-press.aspx
Now Who's Being Naive, Kay? Or, Reflections on the Fundamental Contempt In Which the Enthusiast Press Is Held By Publishers--And Its Own Employers
N'Gai Croal
Lester Bangs: Aw, man. You made friends with them. See, friendship is the booze they feed you. They want you to get drunk on feeling like you belong.
William Miller: Well, it was...fun.
Bangs: They make you feel cool. And hey, I met you. You are not cool.
Miller: I know. Even when I thought I was, I knew I wasn't.
Bangs: That's because we are uncool. And while women will always be a problem for guys like us, most of the great art in the world is about that very problem. I mean, good-looking people, they got no spine. Their art never lasts. They may get the girls, but we're smarter.
Miller: Yeah, I can really see that now.
Bangs: Yeah, 'cause that's what great art is about: conflict and pain and guilt and longing and love disguised as sex, and sex disguised as love...and hey, let's face it, you got a big head start.
Miller: I'm glad you were home.
Bangs: I'm always home. I'm uncool.
Miller: Me too.
Bangs: You're doing great. The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool. Listen, my advice to you--and I know you think those guys are your friends--if you want to be a true friend to them, be honest, and unmerciful.
--William Miller and Lester Bangs in "Almost Famous"
It is the international system of currency which determines the vitality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today. And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature. And You. Will. Atone. Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?
--Arthur Jensen to Howard Beale in "Network"
The first time we realized the profound contempt with which videogame publishers regard the enthusiast press came in early in this millennium. We had noticed that over the course of several issues, a certain publication had repeatedly taken shots at several of a single company's titles--all of which had been very well received--in its short pieces and its reviews. Now no outlet is forced to like any particular game or games, but it had gotten to the point where we'd take a look at this publication and, like clockwork, a game from this publisher was being eviscerated. In the course of a conversation with a senior publicist with whom we were and remain friendly, we asked them whether they'd noticed this trend. No, but I'll look into it, we were told.
Not long thereafter, the publicist told us that they'd informed their marketing department of the offending copy; marketing then immediately pulled its advertising from the outlet in question, forcefully demonstrating that the publisher would not allow itself to be treated in this manner. From that point on, our close reading of the publication's contents showed that the reprisal had had the desired effect, because the relentless jabs at the company's games immediately ceased. And after several months, the publisher once again began running its ads therein, its point having been made loud and clear.
We'd be lying to you if we said that we immediately recognized this episode as a demonstration of the contempt publishers have for the enthusiast press. After all, we'd only been covering videogames seriously for a couple of years at the time. So while we certainly recognized that our employers at Newsweek wouldn't have the same vulnerability to videogame publishers as would enthusiast magazines, the matter-of-fact way in which the publicist shared the details of their company's scorched earth retaliation led us to presume that this was considered an acceptable way to deal with the specialist press, in a way it would not be with the mainstream media.
We've been thinking back to that incident a lot recently in the wake of the news of GameSpot editorial director Jeff Gerstmann's termination, allegedly over parent company C|Net's concern with publisher discontent over the substance, tone and scores in GameSpot's review of Eidos' Kane & Lynch. 1UP.com reported that Sony Computer Entertainment had also expressed its discontent with GameSpot's review of Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction, which matches what we were told by a publicist for yet another publisher unhappy with a recent GameSpot review of its game. For its part, C|Net has defended itself with the following statement--" For over a decade, GameSpot and the many members of its editorial team have produced thousands of unbiased reviews that have been a valuable resource for the gaming community. At CNET Networks, we stand behind the editorial content that our teams produce on a daily basis"--while refusing to comment directly on the circumstances behind Gerstmann's firing. Though maddening, this is perfectly understandable, given employment laws, severance packages, non-disclosure agreements and/or potential litigation. And we must stipulate that there is still much that has yet to be revealed, and it's rare that a single incident results in the firing of a beloved employee. So if and when all shoes drop, we're fairly certain that all sides will be sporting a certain amount of mud.
Nevertheless, someone who was purporting to be a current GameSpot employee put the situation in context with the following comment on Valleywag:
Also, keep in mind that these salespeople do have axes to grind with editorial. I know a lot of people busted their asses to get not only this large deal with Eidos done, but also other huge ad deals. The salespeople and the marketers are the ones who have to deal with the publishers when a heavily-advertised game gets a bad review, so obviously they like it if every game that comes out is peachy keen and gets a 9.0 or above. If a salesperson knows anything about unprofessional review practices, then that says a lot about the management team that we have in place because not a single other member of the editorial team had heard word one about this until Jeff was fired. Surely site management would want to let us know about their concerns before firing the most senior staff member and one of the most respected game critics in the industry? If they're sharing their concerns with the salespeople and not with us then that says a lot about their priorities.
Now, we hate to come across as though we're blaming the victim. Yet we can't help but feel as though the deal with the devil that the business side of enthusiast outlets struck long ago--taking advertising dollars from the very companies that they cover--has become increasingly Faustian in recent years. Why? It's primarily because of the rise of the Internet and the new opportunities that it has afforded.
In early 2005, an IGN vice president sat in our offices and explained to us the relationship among editorial, message boards and advertising. As he saw it, IGN's business model centered around generating page views, the cheapest of which to produce being those in the forums, which are generated by users' comments. So from his perspective, content--everything including the first press release announcing the development of a new title; screenshots; video clips; previews; hands-on write-ups; reviews and guides--served as grist for the mill in the forums, boosting the page views and thereby advertiser revenue. But the second part of the equation was IGN's GamerMetrics, by which IGN's business side would convert the clickthroughs, page views, time spent and other info about the site's users into awareness and intent to purchase measurements about avid gamers.
Let us stress that there is nothing sinister about these kinds of services. However, once marketing departments at various publishers began to formally integrate services like IGN's GamerMetrics and GameSpot's Trax into their promotional plans, and more importantly, as retailers started to factor that data into their product orders, there was an obvious incentive for publishers to manipulate those services both to boost awareness--or awareness data--among consumers for their titles and to persuade retailers to stock more of their games.
That manipulation--and make no mistake, several publicists have described it to us over the years using precisely that terminology--took two major forms. One was fairly straightforward: increasing the amount of advertising on a particular site in order to make a game more prominent in gamers' minds. The other form of manipulation was less obvious: goosing a game's presence in a site's editorial content by releasing more screenshots and video assets; making developers available for interviews; sending over preview code, etc.
One would have to be naïve or foolish not to understand that there has always been a mutually beneficial relationship between journalists who cover consumer products or entertainment and the manufacturers or publishers of the goods in question. The journalist and his or her outlet gets a story that is of interest to their readership, while the company gets exposure for whatever they're trying to sell, and this remains true today. The Internet, however, enabled the metrics generated by that longstanding process to evolve from indirect measurements of how readers were engaged with a magazine (i.e. circulation and pass-along) to direct ones of how viewers were navigating a Web site (clickthroughs, page views, downloads and the like). Here's how GameSpot describes its Trax service on its site:
Launched in Q1 2003, GameSpot Trax is the industry's most advanced tool for tracking and analyzing essential game data, including consumer awareness, interest and purchase intent, competitive mindshare, campaign effectiveness, audience profiles, and editorial coverage. GameSpot Trax is the scorecard for the games industry.
By offering that extremely valuable data back to publishers, who then incorporate that information into not only their marketing plans (how much to spend in ad dollars on a particular site) but also their public relations plans (which sites get which editorial opportunities), this relationship has been transformed from symbiotic to parasitic. At best, these practices begin to erode the Chinese wall between editorial and advertising. At worst, it effectively if indirectly co-opts the editorial departments of certain enthusiast outlets into becoming an arm of their business operations. Because if sites like GameSpot and IGN whose Trax and GamerMetrics services are being used by videogame retailers to inform their purchasing decisions, it stands to reason that these sites would derive from that an advantage when publicists are deciding to whom they should offer various editorial opportunities. And let's not forget that these are the same publicists who are under pressure to maintain and boost awareness of their employer's titles; that awareness being measured in part by--yep, that's right--Trax and GamerMetrics.
Diane Keaton and Al Pacino in "The Godfather"
Now factor into this the fundamentally broken nature of the preview-feature-review process, in which historically previews and features have almost invariably been positive--or optimistic, if we're being more charitable--before the truth, good or bad, was finally revealed in the text and scoring of the review. Again, this is no different from other forms of entertainment, where absent known conflict or scandal among the creators, pre-release coverage is generally upbeat. But as one publicist we spoke with earlier this week told us, one of the most challenging parts of her job was trying to reconcile for her bosses the disparity between the rah-rah tone of previews and features with negative reviews and review scores whenever one arose.
This is particularly true in the post-Metacritic, post-Game Rankings era, where publishers now gnaw on their fingernails anxiously as each review score comes in, weighing the impact that said score has upon the all-important average. Several publishers have publicly acknowledged that they use these scores to determine bonus compensation for their developers; analysts cite them in their reports; even blogs such as Level Up cite them and link to them frequently, demonstrating the way that Metacritic or Game Rankings scores have rapidly become shorthand for product quality. As such, individual scores carry that much more weight--that goes double for heavily trafficked outfits like GameSpot--and publishers therefore fixate on any scores that might drag down that average.
The Gerstmann-C|Net incident, therefore, suggests that having successfully stage-managed the first two parts of the process for years, thanks to the generous spirit in which previews and features have long been written, certain publishers may now be flexing their muscles more forcefully when it comes to the third: reviews. This publisher-editorial tension, as one journalist from an enthusiast outlet informed us, is at its most contentious during the run-up to Christmas, because the pre-holiday period is the time of year when stakes are highest for some companies. That's even more true during this holiday season, which despite the absence of Grand Theft Auto IV will go down as one of the most competitive on record, loaded as it is with AAA hopefuls all seeking their place in the sun.
(The stakes are so high, in fact, that Eidos, whose Kane & Lynch has been at the center of the Gerstmann-C|Net controversy, has apparently gone one step beyond even Sony Pictures and its fake movie reviewer of several years back: according to Kotaku, the U.K. publisher is now resorting to inventing five-star review scores and attributing them to actual outlets. The offending faux reviews have since been pulled; nevertheless, this type of brazenly fraudulent act is another sign of the contempt that publishers have for the enthusiast press, to say nothing of the consumer--or the folks at Kane & Lynch developer IO Interactive for that matter, who, no matter what we think of their game, are being tarnished by their publisher's desperate tactics.)
Let us say this clearly: we are not in this post casting any aspersions on the sanctity of the editorial operations of sites like GameSpot. We do not yet know all of the factors that played into the parting of the ways between Gerstmann and his employer, and we most likely never will. But we are saying that that the increased entanglement of financial interests between the business operations of those enthusiast outlets and the publishers whom those outlets cover was always fraught with danger; and there are signs that the recent firing of Gerstmann may be the collateral damage. Thus in light of the increasingly problematic money-and-data-driven relationship that we've detailed among enthusiast sites, publishers and retailers, to be shocked, shocked by C|Net's firing of Gerstmann is to be the frog slowly sinking to his watery grave, wondering all the while why the scorpion repaid his kindness by fatally stinging him. C'mon, folks. It's his nature.
The only solution to this problem is for the editorial divisions of these enthusiast outlets who are being strong-armed by publishers and/or their own business operations to shine a light on these practices, much as Kotaku did with Sony earlier this year. Of course, it's easy for us to call for this sort of resolute bravery when Newsweek isn't dependent on videogame advertising and our livelihoods are not at stake. We recognize that some companies literally can't afford to alienate their advertisers, so far be it from us to knock another publication's hustle. But when they remain silent in the face of such intimidation, the net effect, as George Bernard Shaw's hoary witticism goes, is to establish what they are; the only thing left after that is to determine their price.
What drove home the contempt theme was an email exchange we had with a prominent industry veteran last week discussing the then-breaking news about Gerstmann's termination. We ended the discussion surprised at how nonchalant he was about the whole affair; after all, this was someone who had repeatedly and fulsomely praised the value and importance (his words) of our own work, which had led us to believe that he would appreciate the journalistic issues at stake. But his casual dismissal was bracing. And it has forced us to acknowledge the reality underlying numerous conversations we've had over the years with people who work in various facets of videogame publishing.
The reality is this: publishers generally hold the enthusiast press in utter contempt, and they have for a long time. This disdain began as scorn for the enthusiast media's roots in videogame fandom, rather than traditional journalism from "respectable" publications, but it has since metastasized into a veiled but nonetheless seething anger over the advent of the Internet and with it the rise of fan sites, forums and blogs over which publishers can exert little pressure, let alone control. The contempt emanating from the publishing community, by the way, is not limited to the enthusiast press. In our view, it extends to publicists, whom certain executives believe can and should be able to dictate the nature of their coverage and secure review scores of a certain magnitude. It even extends to their own developers, for whom Metacritic and Game Rankings scores can dangle as precipitously as the sword of Damocles, as if these executives were incapable of determining for themselves the quality of their games and taking action accordingly. This even though, ironically, said executives have little respect for any individual reviewer whose score, when aggregated with those of his fellows, makes up the rankings they employ so assiduously.
The current state of affairs reminds us of a situation a friend of ours found himself in back in 1994. While reporting a feature story on Wu-Tang Clan, journalist Cheo Hodari Coker was punched in the face and had his tape recorder taken by a member of the hip-hop super group in retaliation for illustrations that had accompanied a previous Wu-Tang feature that our buddy had written. The group's manager attempted to cover up the incident, cutting Coker a check on the spot. But he refused to cash the check or hold his tongue; instead, he wrote an op-ed about the event in The Source. One thing he told us about the incident has always stayed with us: that what pained Coker was his firm belief that had he been a white writer from Rolling Stone rather than a black writer from Mouth 2 Mouth, Wu-Tang would not have had the audacity to assault him.
Fast forward 13 years later and we find ourselves at Level Up in the "white writer from Rolling Stone" position, as do our peers in the mainstream press like Seth Schiesel at The New York Times, Dean Takahashi at the San Jose Mercury News, Stephen Totilo at MTV News, Geoff Keighley at Spike TV and others. Eidos wouldn't have the audacity to strong-arm any of us over a review or some other piece of writing whose facts were not in question, and if they did, our employers would back us to the hilt. So to look down the road at our peers in the enthusiast press and see this happening to them is just as infuriating as when we were in college and one of our best friends was attacked. But if they don't follow his example by speaking up and speaking out so that these practices can be exposed, there's little that anyone can do to assist them.
So in closing, we say again to the enthusiast press: Gerstmann's termination is merely the symptom; the disease is the contempt in which you are held by any publisher who would attempt to intimidate you over your opinion and any business operation that refuses to support you in the face of such intimidation. And given the symbiotic at best, parasitic at worst relationship that we've outlined between editorial operations and the assorted moneymen surrounding it whose gold gives them the power to make the rules, we haven't the faintest non-fatal suggestion for how to close up Pandora's box now that it is wide open.
More Excellent links on this issue
http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=8587828&publicUserId=4561231
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2007/11/30/
--
http://edrlopez.blogspot.com/
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