People want to be liked. I want to be liked. Maybe a journalist should ideally try to repress that instinct (at least according to one professor), but it's unrealistic to expect me to stop being a human being because of my job. I, like just about every writer I can think of, enjoy the positive validation of seeing people enjoy something I've written, or watching lots of people share a story I'm proud of. And like most human beings, I don't enjoy seeing people trash me on the Internet, especially when I don't think it's justified.
No offense, but that's the problem. You can be liked, but at the same time you need to call bullshit on PR people. You need to sit the "Peter Moores" of the industry down like Shoe did and go "why the hell is your console breaking 1 year after launch and the number of reports about this is increasing by the day?"
"...Well, you know things, they break..."
"...Yeah, but they shouldn't be breaking within the first five years, surely?"
Questions like that. Make the subject sweat. It may piss them off, but you're doing
your job of investigating/reporting to the masses
why the company heads/companies are screwing them in terms of hardware/software/etc. practices.
That isn't to say you can't be buddy buddy with some people in PR, but if you're buddy buddy with those people you need to sit yourself out of those interview/situations due to conflict in interest.
The "lol game journalism" approach is just insulting and immature.
Sure, but it's just as insulting and immature that the journalists can't listen to why GAF/public at large are mocking them. Circle of jerks and all that?
As for your last point: you're right. Every day I see threads about Kotaku articles. Some about stories or columns I wrote or news I broke.
Yet the people here seem to dislike Kotaku. It makes no sense!
IIRC, you've come into Kotaku after... 7-8 years of Brian Crecente or however the fuck you spell his name running the site into the ground/making it a joke. My distaste for Kotaku started in 2004 (and ironically enough Joystiq started to go that route shortly after) because 1) they aren't providing too many interesting articles and 2) most of the articles they do provide are either "this is news?" (BUT WE'RE A BLOG!) or "Brian Crecente blogs about his kid" (or whoever the hell Kotaku's owner at the time was) which isn't news and is more a personal blog thing, not a game blog/"journalism" thing.
So you're inheriting a LOT years of distaste and expecting people to let that go is slightly foolish and a fools errand, dude. You want to change my opinion? You have to
change yourself and the site itself to where the content that does get posted on GAF is less "LOL KOTAKU" and more "hey, that's actually a good article, there's more of this from Kotaku?"
It can happen but it takes time and effort. Every post you've posted in here so far (and other threads that mention Kotaku) is paraphrasing "Y U GUYZ NOT LYKE US!? D: WE LYKE US!
!!!!!" and that's missing the forest for the trees. We've told you
why we don't like it (too much "non-news"/unboxing/PR articles) and yet you go "well, that's what readers want!"
Maybe that's Kotaku's readers. But that isn't the "GAF hivemind" and so you're not going to convenience us that those articles are good. What
would would be more insightful articles like the Silicon Knight's article. But the problem is (and this has been stated by other journalists on Twitter) that PR/dev heads will cockblock your inquires and that dovetails into the "LOL GAMES JOURNALISM" problem. Because you aren't getting these insightful articles unless the
entire industry changes and creates a paradigm shift in the industry to where the industry goes "no,
fuck you" and stops black-listing/making enemies (sup, R
aob and other journalists in the past blowing the whistle), stops having greased palms (sup, 3DS at GiantBomb entry, sup Ass Creed 3 flag and PR letter, sup free games...), and actually buckles down and levels up to the level of normal journalists.