Scopa
The Tribe Has Spoken
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Drama at Kotaku
- Thread starter Jooxed
- Start date
Orpheum
Member
This. Losing your job sucks and i hope they land on their feet. That being said....Kotaku is trash and won't be missed
cormack12
Gold Member
I'll be honest - I don't think labelling him as an 'investigative journalist' has done anything to squash that ego. If you write for a specific target audience and that audience gobbles down your content that's fair enough, but when your a slave to the content tone and bias you produce you lose the integrity and honesty. Let's give an example - again, sports teams are the easiest to provide because they have such partisan and definitive divides.
Lets' say you write two articles about this team. They both focus on the off season. One tries to find the positives in all the new players (despite price and quality), it paints a picture of positivity and transition sprinkled in with some appeals to authority. It reviews the owners performance and highlights key areas of investments like training grounds and commercial deals.
Let's say the other article is more negative . It criticises some of the off season purchases heavily as not being the right players to change the teams fortunes. It highlights the owners plans to increase merchandise costs and a 10% priceincrease to tickets. It laments the strides other teams have made in the off season and about how we are playing second fiddle and about to be overtaken as the resut of poor decisions.
Now article one might get 30,000 likes and 20,000 RT's and a shit load of views, with a lot of ego scratching comments. Second article gets a crazy amount of troll and negative comments aimed at you personally, gets laughed at and no one wants to hear it. Which articles are you going to continue writing. How will your coverage be slanted in the future? Which type of article will raise your profile in your target audience? Which side do you become a slave to?
Look at Jason's articles like Nicalis and Rockstar etc. They focus on telling a story. All they do is consolidate a 'theme' from various ex/disgruntled/unhappy employee's and try to paint a broad brush over the entire organisation. There's no empirical data, there's no context around the scopes of the sources, there's no cost:benefit ratio, there's no alternative side to the story. WHy not interview happy employee's and see what their take is. Because plenty of them come out on twitter afterwards proclaiming their love for a job that is tough (at times) but very rewarding. Completely contrary to the one side of the argment he decided to give voice to.
Long articles with citations from prejudice do not make good journalists. And when making your point relies on framing a particular aspect of the 'story' then maybe you're actually scared of bringing the truth into scope because the view your trying to push is actually more important than presenting both sides of the argument and letting the reader decide for themselves. The worst thing is those people online who then push these articles showing they are 'informed' or have something credible to back up their force fed opinion. I would rather speak with someone who challenges my viewpoint (however misinformed), in order that I can justify how I arrived at it.
I think Carl Bernstein sums it up quite well:
Also N NickFire - enjoyed reading your posts in this thread. They have saved me typing on several occasions.
Lets' say you write two articles about this team. They both focus on the off season. One tries to find the positives in all the new players (despite price and quality), it paints a picture of positivity and transition sprinkled in with some appeals to authority. It reviews the owners performance and highlights key areas of investments like training grounds and commercial deals.
Let's say the other article is more negative . It criticises some of the off season purchases heavily as not being the right players to change the teams fortunes. It highlights the owners plans to increase merchandise costs and a 10% priceincrease to tickets. It laments the strides other teams have made in the off season and about how we are playing second fiddle and about to be overtaken as the resut of poor decisions.
Now article one might get 30,000 likes and 20,000 RT's and a shit load of views, with a lot of ego scratching comments. Second article gets a crazy amount of troll and negative comments aimed at you personally, gets laughed at and no one wants to hear it. Which articles are you going to continue writing. How will your coverage be slanted in the future? Which type of article will raise your profile in your target audience? Which side do you become a slave to?
Look at Jason's articles like Nicalis and Rockstar etc. They focus on telling a story. All they do is consolidate a 'theme' from various ex/disgruntled/unhappy employee's and try to paint a broad brush over the entire organisation. There's no empirical data, there's no context around the scopes of the sources, there's no cost:benefit ratio, there's no alternative side to the story. WHy not interview happy employee's and see what their take is. Because plenty of them come out on twitter afterwards proclaiming their love for a job that is tough (at times) but very rewarding. Completely contrary to the one side of the argment he decided to give voice to.
Long articles with citations from prejudice do not make good journalists. And when making your point relies on framing a particular aspect of the 'story' then maybe you're actually scared of bringing the truth into scope because the view your trying to push is actually more important than presenting both sides of the argument and letting the reader decide for themselves. The worst thing is those people online who then push these articles showing they are 'informed' or have something credible to back up their force fed opinion. I would rather speak with someone who challenges my viewpoint (however misinformed), in order that I can justify how I arrived at it.
I think Carl Bernstein sums it up quite well:
Also N NickFire - enjoyed reading your posts in this thread. They have saved me typing on several occasions.
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Screamer-RSA
Member
Scopa
The Tribe Has Spoken
Nah. They’ll be too busy having paid for lunches and drinks at the bar to attend. Unions are a big, fat scam.Are they going to stand by him outside the building?
Find me a skinny union leader. I triple-dare you.
GooseMan69
Member
Yeah, and why don’t all these journalists just start their own site and do what they want? Since their content is so well received and popular.
Shmunter
Member
These journos crying it’s a tough day in the office etc. knowing how soft these people are it was probably just a smaller serving of tartar sauce with their fish fingers at lunch.
Shmunter
Member
H
hariseldon
Unconfirmed Member
You'd be missing out then. There's very little of that kind of thing in Retro Gamer, and the quality of investigative journalism is excellent - actual deep dives into retro gaming, interviews with all kinds of interesting people without a gender pronoun in sight.
rofif
Can’t Git Gud
yt news channel about gaming. Sorry I cannot link right now (work)
Touch fuzZy. get BizZay
Member
What if there's a story out there waiting to be told about meeting FOUR good dogs?
Wouldn't that show these bigots
Wouldn't that show these bigots
cormack12
Gold Member
H
hariseldon
Unconfirmed Member
Soo... it's a nothingburger then. Built my hopes up you bastards.
GamingKaiju
Member
What’s that saying..... Go woke go broke. PC culture is a cancer.
Touch fuzZy. get BizZay
Member
nush
Gold Member
Quick recheck, it's still not on the front page of Resetera gaming 3 hours after I last checked. Ree don't care and if any Kotaku writer thinks those hypothetical pledges of support for a Patreon will ever follow through they are a bigger fool than they already show themselves up to be.
Yoshi
Headmaster of Console Warrior Jugendstrafanstalt
The current governor of Thüringen was a union leader from 1990 to 1999, I cannot find pictures that old of him, but some older pictures indicate he was not fat then:
Scopa
The Tribe Has Spoken
I think you missed the point, Yosh.The current governor of Thüringen was a union leader from 1990 to 1999, I cannot find pictures that old of him, but some older pictures indicate he was not fat then:
Yoshi
Headmaster of Console Warrior Jugendstrafanstalt
I never do.
H4ze
Member
Honestly, I did not know Kotaku was as much hated as ResetEra, could someone clarify that for me a bit?
Never followed them, sometimes I read an article when it got linked at some forum but that's it.
Also, I always tought Schreier was some well regarded journalist and now I see a lot of hate for him here.
Never followed them, sometimes I read an article when it got linked at some forum but that's it.
Also, I always tought Schreier was some well regarded journalist and now I see a lot of hate for him here.
AV
We ain't outta here in ten minutes, we won't need no rocket to fly through space
Kotaku finds it incredibly difficulty to separate politics from gaming, and tends to inject it into almost anything they can. Naturally, every single person writing for Kotaku is left leaning. So what you get is a constant stream of preachy, propaganda-driven bile when what you wanted was video game coverage.
Schreier is a mentally unstable shrew that has a complete and total inability to engage in any criticism or disagreement with anything he says or does, and his preferred method of dealing with those people is immediately blocking them on Twitter and labeling them as alt-right.
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nush
Gold Member
Last month they posted an article with animated/CG underage porn images. That's quite possibly the lowest they have gone on top of a bunch of historical stuff.
Sleepy Buddha
Member
Nah, they'll follow the Phil Fish example and become lousy DJs or baristas. And hopefully fuck right off our hobby.
GreyHorace
Member
Chat where? On REEra?
CyberPanda
Banned
Y’all are so mean to Shitaku.
Bryank75
Banned
Twitter. I'm suspended now though... again.
Kotaku used to regularly post gaming-related news, and their biggest flaw at that time was probably that most of the news they posted was pulled directly from NeoGAF.
At some point, they started shifting towards more hot takes and clickbait articles. That eventually progressed into Kotaku pushing a political agenda into almost every article with less actual gaming news. They still have a rare article that's relevant, but ever since GamerGate they've been unbearable.
Schreier is well-regarded due to his status within Kotaku's organization, but he is petty and fragile. Much of the investigative journalism he does is only possible because of his position within a popular gaming website. I wouldn't shit on his work as quickly as others here, I appreciate many of his articles, however he dismisses anyone that offers any criticism and he has a huge superiority complex. He is a pretentious dick best illustrated by how he talks to YongYea in the following video:
He loves to shit on YouTubers all the time for stealing other people's work even though Kotaku built itself on that same premise.
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lock2k
Banned
I'm thankful because Kotaku showed Neogaf to me. They were useful for that. After I started to browse Gaf I stopped visiting that site.
H
hariseldon
Unconfirmed Member
So... can anyone provide a summary of what happened?
Scopa
The Tribe Has Spoken
Jooxed
Gold Member
Some editor at deadspin was fired for not doing his job. Kotaku journalists are friends with him and unionizing or something and protesting. A bunch of deadspin writers resigned
H
hariseldon
Unconfirmed Member
So Kotaku remains alive then. Bollocks.
nush
Gold Member
Damn, that's 90 minutes, I got through 45 of them. It gets interesting at about 30 minutes in. What I got was that Jason's lack of self awareness any hypocrisy was something we've already picked up on just through text.
rob305
Member
Theyre mostly based in the bay area and NYC, more like theyre living barely above the poverty line. Schreiers wife is a corporate lawyer in NYC, we all know who makes the money in that household and who wears the pants
Edit: he also mentioned hes on paternity leave the other day lol
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DryPancakes
Banned
What a joke, this is a look into the future if game devs unionize, no wonder it is the journos pushing for it.
Nydius
Member
Exactly true. People think he'd be OK if Kotaku fell apart because of his supposed investigative journalist work. Sure, his work would probably get him more interviews than other Kotaku writers but it doesn't mean he'd be successful. Compared to actual, boots in the mud, investigative journalism, Schreier's work is mediocre at best. Not to minimize how much work goes into those long form reports he writes but his work is done mostly sitting behind a desk thanks to years of friendly contacts in the industry. I can't see him working outside of his comfort zone to cultivate new sources in order to write a piece outside the video gaming sphere.
Beyond that, his interactions on Twitter, here on NeoGAF in years past, and over on ResetERA show he's far too thin skinned to make it in a traditional, antagonistic, journalism environment. He'd fold and start complaining about being treated poorly.
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Zimmy68
Member
As someone who used Gawker sites (what I call them) as their daily driver this is all sad news to me.
Kotaku seems like a shell of its former self.
Deadspin staff are abandoning ship in droves.
Why buy the site and then try to change them?
I hated the auto play sound (the videos always auto played, the sound thing was new to me) but I didn't complain.
BTW, anyone recommend another decent sports blog?
TheBigLead is now awful also.
Kotaku seems like a shell of its former self.
Deadspin staff are abandoning ship in droves.
Why buy the site and then try to change them?
I hated the auto play sound (the videos always auto played, the sound thing was new to me) but I didn't complain.
BTW, anyone recommend another decent sports blog?
TheBigLead is now awful also.
zeorhymer
Member
Don't forget to buy Jason's book! He's the most trusted video game journalist.
He's already complained that we're all alt-right chuds and that he can code....
Personally, I think Obama deserves credit for standing up for free speech and genuine decency on the internet. I do hear and understand the argument that he should have spoken up much earlier when his voice would have made a bigger impact. But I see two very real possibilities that I think are more fair assumptions of why he didn't. First, as President I am guessing his day was much, much busier, and he may not have realized how bad cancel culture had become because he was focused elsewhere. The second is the simple possibility that his views changed over time, and that increased knowledge and/or reflection brought him to finally speak up.
Free speech is under attack. Defenders should not reject allies just because of past or current political differences. A healthy democracy includes robust debate and disagreement, but a mutual respect and defense of constitutional rights.
The journos should consider how tough they make other people's lives when they get people to buy into their propaganda. Imagine being in charge of paying the bills or preparing financial disclosures, seeing tremendous revenue or good will value disappear, being required to explain the situation, and knowing damn well that if they spoke honestly (a few employees decided to shun 40-80% of the the audience / customers) they'd be fired?
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GreyHorace
Member
For me, Schreier lost what litttle credibility he had when he posted this garbage:
You're a whiny and pretentious journalist who covers consumer products. What kind of fucking drugs are you on to not realize that consumers are your main audience for your overtly long blog posts that you like to present as journalism asshole?
I'd kill to earn 50k a month. In Schreier's place I'd keep my mouth shut and focus on videogames. None of this social justice horseshit he seems intent on ruining his career for.
Lol. Really? Man he really is a cuck if his wife is the breadwinner. And man, $50k and yet barely making ends meet? Living in New York must be insane.
You're a whiny and pretentious journalist who covers consumer products. What kind of fucking drugs are you on to not realize that consumers are your main audience for your overtly long blog posts that you like to present as journalism asshole?
I'd kill to earn 50k a month. In Schreier's place I'd keep my mouth shut and focus on videogames. None of this social justice horseshit he seems intent on ruining his career for.
Lol. Really? Man he really is a cuck if his wife is the breadwinner. And man, $50k and yet barely making ends meet? Living in New York must be insane.
You keep seeing people post this crap and it makes me laugh.
“Deadspin had never been about sports.”
Yeah, and Deadspin has never made a profit. Maybe they should try not losing money by focusing on sports.
People are acting as if Deadspin’s narcissistic whining they call a blog is somehow sacred or something. It can’t be changed.
