Wardrox, She Wrote: Publish Important, Not Popular News

[Before I get to the point of this article, I should explain why there's no video here. A few weeks ago I went and bought myself a copy of Pinnacle Studio 14 HD for video editing. It was cheap and did all the basic stuff I wanted. It has failed in nearly every way possible since and I am currently in the process of asking for my money back.

If you want to watch this week's W, SW it is available on YouTube. However, due to errors with the final cut than I'm not very happy with, it won't be posted here.

Future W,SW's will likely be much more basic videos (so Pinnacle can't fuck up as much). They may also, similar to this week's column, be accompanied with text. So, without further technical problems, to my article.]

The second you have people following and reading your work, you have a responsibility. Like with any form of journalism your job (and I’m talking to videogame “journalists” here) is to work out what’s going on and to inform your readers. You make the decision of what is important and what isn’t.

If we all had 100% rock solid morals and no need to eat, videogame journalism as a whole would be spectacular. Honest thoughts, chased up facts and fully attributed, contextualised quotes would be plentiful. Sadly, this is not the case. People need to get them some good ol’ page views and to do that many in the press resort to posting inaccurate, misleading articles, or simply soft-core porn.

Where this becomes a real problem is less in the posting-to-get-hits, but with the counter impact it has. Writers often don’t cover news they know is important simply because they know it won’t get as many hits. It’s why, with stories like the Evony related one you saw hundreds of sites report on the adverts (they had tits in), and almost none reporting on the legal drama going on right now. The latter simply doesn’t rake in the traffic.

This embedded problem is one that requires a shift in the mentalities of the people running the larger publications in order to be fixed. People need to stop simply looking at news as a way to fill space and meet targets and instead look at it for what it actually is: news.

Sites need to man-up and admit they have a responsibility and that they have the qualifications to tell people what’s important. They need to post the important news even if it forces the average reader to think rather than posting “Japanese game X has tits, look at them”.