[EvB]

So I caught this thread yesterday on here that somebody had noticed a ? on Mediamolecule's games section which linked to an 80's music video.

As it turns out and I pointed out in the thread, that part of the website had been there since before September last year.

Here is a snapshot of the page from October
http://web.archive.org/web/201210160...ule.com/games/

Here are some crazy time travellers from September last year talking about it on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/Grayspence/statu...37548866490368

Been browsing a few sites this evening and see that the contents of that thread is being reported as "News" by various places.

So far
Polygon
IGN
Videogamer.com

and a whole bunch of others
https://www.google.com/news?ncl=diHj...=English&hl=en

Seriously, what is it with games websites, why can't they do their own research or at the very least check their sources?
Non of the websites have even cited Neogaf as being the place that the news has come from either.

[ElectricBlanketFire]

What Neogaf needs to do is print out and mail a copy of each thread to itself and not open the envelope. The thread is now copyrighted.

Source: My uncle.

[Wario64]

From yesterday:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=512672


First article that popped up shortly after:

http://www.onlysp.com/2013/02/10/mot...al-in-10-days/



I don't mind it, just make sure to show where you got it

[JeffGrubb]

Quesiton: I use NeoGAF all the time as a place to get started. If I see something on NeoGAF first, I'll give you guys the "Via NeoGAF" thing. Is that good enough?

Keep in mind that that isn't all I do. I'm mostly doing my own reporting, but our staff isn't very deep. It's mostly me doing all of the reporting with one other news writer out doing interviews and visits in S.F. every day of the week.

So it's hard to ignore a fast repository of potential news like NeoGAF.

[G-Fex]

Game Journalism is as bad a word as Gamer

[santi_yo]

Yep, I remember watching that "?" video in October. It's not new. Not at all.

[Zee-Row]

Some of you guys should be getting royalties , IGN and other game sites always get their news from here.

[ElTopo]

Most of journalism = Copy + paste

[grimshawish]

Polygon at least used to copy and paste PR notices, not from the direct source but other gaming sites. Not sure if they do this anymore but.

It was the Pizza for Halo debacle where they pretended to be a UK centric site.

[Withnail]

Most game journalists simply spend all day lurking on GAF looking for things to write about.

Hi guys!

Personally I think that any game journalists regularly using GAF as a source for their work should have the decency to also post here, ideally using their real name. Contribute to the discussion rather than just being a parasite.

[No_Style]

Most of journalism = Copy + paste

Yeap. This isn't a "games journalism" exclusive.

[G-Fex]

Most game journalists simply spend all day lurking on GAF looking for things to write about. Hi guys!

KOTAKU: SHHHHHHHH.


I hate Kotaku

[Alec2DaBreen]

Most game journalists simply spend all day lurking on GAF looking for things to write about. Hi guys!

This is true. I used to do it myself.

[Morgadeth]

You've never heard of quoting a source? It's what news writers do.

[injurai]

What Neogaf needs to do is print out and mail a copy of each thread to itself and not open the envelope. The thread is now copyrighted. Source: My uncle.

Look at it this way. As long as these shitty sites are reposting our news to a viewer base of less discerning tastes and less reputable demeanor the better off gaf is by keeping the scum at bay.




© 2013 Injurai

[Hasemo]

"Normal" journalism is like that too, you know.

[GameE]

Sites always steal from neogaf, its disgusting really :\
I know that Allgamesbeta does that and even lifts titles right from threads here o_O

[mastrbiggy]

I don't really follow any of those sites, but I really enjoy Patrick Kelpeck's news articles.

[kayos90]

"Normal" journalism is like that too, you know.

Yup. A lot of normal day-to-day news reporting is almost like game journalism.

[MiniBossBattle]

Step 1: Disable copy/paste on this website.
Step 2: Watch game journalism tear itself apart.

[NateDrake]

Quesiton: I use NeoGAF all the time as a place to get started. If I see something on NeoGAF first, I'll give you guys the "Via NeoGAF" thing. Is that good enough? Keep in mind that that isn't all I do. I'm mostly doing my own reporting, but our staff isn't very deep. It's mostly me doing all of the reporting with one other news writer out doing interviews and visits in S.F. every day of the week. So it's hard to ignore a fast repository of potential news like NeoGAF.

Sourcing NeoGAF is fine since you acknowledge you got the information from here. Some sites fail to give GAF credit for finding such things and run it as if they discovered the Tweet or tease on their own.

[Killthee]

Quesiton: I use NeoGAF all the time as a place to get started. If I see something on NeoGAF first, I'll give you guys the "Via NeoGAF" thing. Is that good enough? Keep in mind that that isn't all I do. I'm mostly doing my own reporting, but our staff isn't very deep. It's mostly me doing all of the reporting with one other news writer out doing interviews and visits in S.F. every day of the week. So it's hard to ignore a fast repository of potential news like NeoGAF.

Good enough for me as long as you also include a link to the original thread.

[kenta]

I feel like writers try to tiptoe around excessively crediting NeoGAF so it doesn't reflect poorly on themselves, but frankly I'd quite enjoy a site/service that surfaces the most relevant news and information from here. Like Techmeme for the game industry or something

[JeffGrubb]

Sites always steal from neogaf, its disgusting really :\ I know that Allgamesbeta does that and even lifts titles right from threads here o_O

Yeah, but NeoGAF just copies and pastes entire articles in a thread from some sites. Sure, you guys post a source link, that doesn't produce any traffic really.

[RiccochetJ]

At least there are some places that have the decency to link to the threads they're writing about.

[EvB]

Has there ever been a NeoGaf experiment into tricking the entire internet community with an elaborate news hoax?

[waterydave]

I do find it amusing when major video game news sites mention that they got their information from NeoGaf. I find it similar to a kid saying "i have playstation 4 already and the graphics are a million times better than anything ever! my uncle works for sony and got if for me." than somehow it ends up on the from of the New York Times.

srsly?

[Mesoian]

Games Journalism = Copy + paste

Most Journalism = Copy + Paste.

The best sources are the ones who break stories first, but don't expect everyone and their mother to not report on confirmed news, regardless of who breaks it first.

[injurai]

Has there ever been a NeoGaf experiment into tricking the entire internet community with an elaborate news hoax?

We just had a poster do this, and then report back on all the sights including Polygon copypasting everything.

[JeffGrubb]

Good enough for me as long as you also include a link to the original thread.

That's what the "Via NeoGAF" text would link to.

[kenta]

Has there ever been a NeoGaf experiment into tricking the entire internet community with an elaborate news hoax?

Metal Gear Solid Triology comes to mind:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost...&postcount=186
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=137707

[jwhit28]

This is the majority of journalism. A story can only be broken once and in an age where anyone can have a big enough voice to be heard they will mostly be broken by twitter or forum members that don't have to worry so much about the fact checking. All the normal outlets can do is follow up, cite the source, and try to make sure it is true.

[Mesoian]

I do find it amusing when major video game news sites mention that they got their information from NeoGaf. I find it similar to a kid saying "i have playstation 4 already and the graphics are a million times better than anything ever! my uncle works for sony and got if for me." than somehow it ends up on the from of the New York Times. srsly?

It's the natural evolution of things. NeoGAF can sometimes sniff out the good and the bad though, only real difference besides using your gut in that, "My dad works for Square, no you can't play Final Fantasy 18, I'll bring it in tomorrow, oh I forgot."

Metal Gear Solid Triology comes to mind: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost...&postcount=186 http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=137707

And even then, it eventually happened. Sort of.

[Wario64]

Has there ever been a NeoGaf experiment into tricking the entire internet community with an elaborate news hoax?

Metal Gear Solid Triology (IGN)


Wasn't elaborate though. Just a press release

[injurai]

Yeah, but NeoGAF just copies and pastes entire articles in a thread from some sites. Sure, you guys post a source link, that doesn't produce any traffic really.

that's for at work or possibly mobile readability.

It's a good thing people do that, I always try to give a good snippet of stuff for people to read.

[TheSpoiler]

This is the majority of journalism. A story can only be broken once and in an age where anyone can have a big enough voice to be heard they will mostly be broken by twitter or forum members that don't have to worry so much about the fact checking. All the normal outlets can do is follow up, cite the source, and try to make sure it is true.

I like to find other angles. It's really hard to confirm things, though, when you've got bigger sites bugging the sources. That being said, you guys have been really good about news and I always read through the threads in the fullest.

A sourcing always happens.

[benny_a]

Step 1: Disable copy/paste on this website. Step 2: Watch game journalism tear itself apart.

[kayos90]

Just wondering, is it surprising to yall that a lot of the game news comes on NeoGAF first? Not for me. It has a ton of users with people working in the industry or has connections to the gaming industry, among others that allows them to have access to "secret" information and the like. Compare that to a site that doesn't have the manpower to find such things, granted they have the time and it's their job, and I think what happens in regards to NeoGAF having first dibs on a lot of news makes sense. I mean... what are the various publications going to do? Not post because it was on NeoGAF. Of course not. People think it's outrageous that various publications get information from NeoGAF. It's not. Also, in regards to copy-paste. Yes that happens but most of the times, if there's so little information in the news you can only reword/rephrase/re-whatever so many times to not make it sound like it was copy and pasted. Come on people.

[Mesoian]

Step 1: Disable copy/paste on this website. Step 2: Watch game journalism tear itself apart.

Naw, then you'll just get stuff like the PA Report, that just links to stories they headline.

[Orca]

A lot of times it's just down to the author following the same people on Twitter that someone here did, but way too often it's blatantly lifted from the thread - even using the same phrasing at times.

[ElectricBlanketFire]

Step 1: Disable copy/paste on this website. Step 2: Watch game journalism tear itself apart.

Step 1: Print screen.
Step 2: Save as PDF.
Step 3: Recognize text.

Journalism ahh...finds a way.

[EvB]

Step 1: Print screen. Step 2: Save as PDF. Step 3: Recognize text. Journalism ahh...finds a way.

They'd probably just link to the PDF.

[Stumpokapow]

Yeah, but NeoGAF just copies and pastes entire articles in a thread from some sites. Sure, you guys post a source link, that doesn't produce any traffic really.

1) You can't compare behaviour by thousands of individual non-professional members of a community who are at best sort of passively moderated to a small number of people supposedly acting in a professional fashion

2) "He did it first" is a pretty lame justification for anything :p

3) We do encourage people to excerpt article and use a teaser-type format. It's not 100% followed, but we do our best. I don't expect teasing actually results in a higher clickthrough rate, just a lower reading comprehension rate. There's no easy answer here, and products like Readability/Instapaper and just generally RSS syndication are a much bigger challenge than a site like GAF. Personally when I post articles on GAF, I almost always link a Readability link for the article, because it's cleaner, easier to read, and permanently archived. This almost certainly negatively impacts authors, but I don't see a better solution.

If you do see an article that's posted without excerpting in a way that's unfair, please let us know and we'll edit the thread.

[Squidofman]

Of course game sites link to GAF. For the same reason they link Reddit, and used to link Digg: most of them have staffs of 5-15 people. These community sites have thousands, or in Reddit's case millions of eyeballs scouring the internet every second for interesting stuff.

So of course they find interesting stuff. Or random/tiny things get noticed. Like this LBP thing.

I don't see a problem with gaming sites linking them (I do it all the time), so long as you credit at least the site, if not the user as well.

Edit: as for the "research" problem, yeah, it's a sad case of what happens when a major site doesn't cite and the "credit trail" is lost.

[JeffGrubb]

that's for at work or possibly mobile readability. It's a good thing people do that, I always try to give a good snippet of stuff for people to read.

I know. I get it. I'm not really complaining. I don't expect anyone on NeoGAF to leave this community to go read news when they're already so comfortable with this, but I'm just saying people get to read my work, and I don't see anything for it.

This thread generated only 72 hits on the original article:



Edit:

I linked to the wrong thread. This is what I originally had:

This thread generated only 130 hits on the original article:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=511791

[RiccochetJ]

Yeah, but NeoGAF just copies and pastes entire articles in a thread from some sites. Sure, you guys post a source link, that doesn't produce any traffic really.

Yea, unfortunately I've seen it happen but it is stated in the TOS that it's not allowed and could get you banned.

[JeffGrubb]

1) You can't compare behaviour by thousands of individual non-professional members of a community who are at best sort of passively moderated to a small number of people supposedly acting in a professional fashion 2) "He did it first" is a pretty lame justification for anything :p 3) We do encourage people to excerpt article and use a teaser-type format. It's not 100% followed, but we do our best. I don't expect teasing actually results in a higher clickthrough rate, just a lower reading comprehension rate. There's no easy answer here, and products like Readability/Instapaper and just generally RSS syndication are a much bigger challenge than a site like GAF. Personally when I post articles on GAF, I almost always link a Readability link for the article, because it's cleaner, easier to read, and permanently archived. This almost certainly negatively impacts authors, but I don't see a better solution. If you do see an article that's posted without excerpting in a way that's unfair, please let us know and we'll edit the thread.

I'm not justifying anything, and I'm not complaining. It is what it is.

It's bad journalism to just take something from a NeoGAF post without confirming it independently. And it's rude to not source a site like NeoGAF if it's where they saw it first.

[JABEE]

I don't think the troublesome part of this event is copying from GAF and not citing it as a source. It's copying from GAF and posting it as news without doing a simple search that would have shown that this "news" was 5 months old.

GAF is a stringent enough news source on its own to get posted on major news outlets.

The way the process is supposed to work is that each site independently checks with their own sources before posting an item. A collection of outlets or one reputable outlet reporting something is supposed to actually mean something to readers of these outlets. They have devalued themselves as writers by bastardizing the process for hits and quick rewards. It is a breakdown that is present in all forms of internet reporting. There is no more room for quality.

Games journalism is just on the lower end of the spectrum when compared to the rest of the shoddy remains of the institution of journalism.

[Man-is-Obsolete]

I read GAF daily and it is actually frustrating seeing "news" articles 3 days after I read it on GAF. lol

Most gaming sites have become too gimmicky anyways, with all their specials and lists they do to try and elicit hits. And IGN's path down of Forbes using contributor articles is very disappointing.

[TheSpoiler]

I know. I get it. I'm not really complaining. I don't expect anyone on NeoGAF to leave this community to go read news when they're already so comfortable with this, but I'm just saying people get to read my work, and I don't see anything for it. This thread generated only 130 hits on the original article: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=511791

You care more about hits than content?

Kotaku? Is that you!?