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Press Reset: The Story of Polygon - financed by Microsoft for $750,000

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P

pseudomyxoma

Member
Dragonzord said:
I don't see how you can think that. Gies and Justin are practically the same person on twitter.
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Wha? I couldn't even follow Arthur on twitter, his constant white knighting male feminist chip on his shoulder asshole personality is the worst, I've never really seen anything like that from Justin
 
T

TheSpoiler

Member
BurnOutBrighter said:
I have a government job that involves processing people's application forms. We have a policy that if you come across the application of someone you know, even just barely, you are to immediately hand the file to your team leader and log what occurred.

Even if I processed the application without any bias whatsoever, the mere fact that I did creates the perception of a conflict of interest. More often than not it's about "what it looks like" rather than what it actually is.

Polygon can go on all day long about how they think they aren't affected by $750,000 of Microsoft money. But if they were responsible journalists, they wouldn't have put themselves in this position in the first place.
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Exactly.

I realize that advertising is part of how they get paid, if not all for many journalist. My site has an annoying little video attached to some articles, even though our payment through Wordpress is all about clicks on the site rather than the ad (I think.)

But getting advertisement from some company you are about to cover before your work starts? Red flags everywhere. By different, did they mean they'll be completely run by their advertisers?
 
M

MiniBossBattle

Member
ShockingAlberto said:
Well, no. It is technically news brought to you by Microsoft. I suspect this is a phrase you will have to get used to typing in the future.



I agree, advertising does drive the industry. It is unfortunate, but journalism is ultimately a business. But I'd like to point you to one of the SPJ guidelines regarding ethics:



And hell, let's throw the part about accountability in there, too.



Can you honestly say Polygon is exemplifying all of these? Or even most of them?

Let's break this down - you received three quarters of a million dollars to produce a documentary about yourselves, something that has no journalistic benefit to anyone and exists only to advertise the now kind of funny notion that you are a new, revolutionary game journalistic outlet, and you received this money from a company you directly cover, ostensibly criticize, and have free reign to editorialize. Ignoring protests over the word "funny," am I correct that this is the reality of the situation? To put it simply, $750,000 were paid to your organization, from Microsoft, in order to subsidize your advertising?

Now, I don't know how much you know about the code of ethics, but I'm not an expert, and even I know this is grey at best. This is not a banner ad on your website to keep the lights on. This is a website that does not exist yet, taking money from one of the companies it covers, to advertise its impending existence. To compare this to coverage of CES sponsored by Ford misses so many rather important details that I am shocked you are either missing them or shocked that you would attempt to throw that ball over our heads and hope we don't notice. Either way, shame on you, seriously. Name-dropping advertisers as if the situations are comparable in an attempt to confuse the situation (or in an attempt to seriously argue it, in which case I don't even know how to respond to that level of fallacious assertions) isn't cool.

If you want to say, hey, we're not beholden to those rules. We just do games journalism. You know what? Go for it. More power to you. You are doing nothing out of your station, nor does anyone expect you to. But if the irony of producing a documentary about how you're raising game journalism out of the ghetto directly subsidized by a company who will be using you for box-quotes in the future is lost on you, then I feel you probably have more problems than simply how much said documentary costs.
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Have to quote this for this page.
Polygon already has the stink of a yellow-newspaper before their site even launches.
 
G

Goldmund

Member
It's the same with studios. Sony and their PlayStation cherish first party titles, Microsoft's Xbox360 heavily relies on third party ones. Sony has the PlayStation Blog, Microsoft will sponsor Polygon. It's transparent enough.
 
W

WrenchNinja

Member
watership said:
Gaf is being very silly. Has anyone had any issues with the articles of VOX publications or on Verge/Polygon so far? I haven't. This PR stuff and their Twitter is another matter, but so far their actual work has been good. Vox stuff has always been high standard, so I expect this to be too. I've issues with Crecente stuff on Kotaku in the past, but Chris Grant and Justin McElroy have done good work.
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I had issues with their inane mass effect 3 spoilercast painting everyone who criticised the ending as whiners and the oh so favourite game journalist word "entitlement" being used to label them as well.
 
M

Margalis

Banned
watership said:
Gaf is being very silly. Has anyone had any issues with the articles of VOX publications or on Verge/Polygon so far?
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Their review of Lollipop Chainsaw was terrible. Does that count?

Edit: Essentially every single assertion in that review was incorrect, from gameplay stuff to the idiotic misogyny angle.

Edit2: As far as "stuff on Polygon has been good"- it's been basically no better or worse than any other gaming website.
 
C

Curufinwe

Member
watership said:
Gaf is being very silly. Has anyone had any issues with the articles of VOX publications or on Verge/Polygon so far? I haven't. This PR stuff and their Twitter is another matter, but so far their actual work has been good. Vox stuff has always been high standard, so I expect this to be too. I've issues with Crecente stuff on Kotaku in the past, but Chris Grant and Justin McElroy have done good work.
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Saying Gaf is "being very silly" isn't a very good rebuttal of the salient points made by ShockingAlberto that pretty much everyone in this thread agrees with.
 
H

hamchan

Member
I feel a cheap video series like Giant Bomb's "how to build a bomb" would have been much better if their goal was to get us to know these personalities.
 
K

Ken Masters

Banned
Taking this long and this much promo for a damn game website was a huge mistake. I do find the documentary episodes interesting but they were better off releasing it all at once
 
P

PowderedToast

Junior Member
BurnOutBrighter said:
I have a government job that involves processing people's application forms. We have a policy that if you come across the application of someone you know, even just barely, you are to immediately hand the file to your team leader and log what occurred.

Even if I processed the application without any bias whatsoever, the mere fact that I did creates the perception of a conflict of interest. More often than not it's about "what it looks like" rather than what it actually is.

Polygon can go on all day long about how they think they aren't affected by $750,000 of Microsoft money. But it looks like they are. If they were responsible journalists, they wouldn't have put themselves in this position in the first place.
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exactly. but this is fucking common sense, pardon my french.
 
D

DocSeuss

Member
Kenshin001 said:
That is a nice fairytale but the Polygon dude said MS courted them in this very thread.
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Yeah, I missed that. Still, similar logic follows. Microsoft knows that Vox is launching a new site, and that Vox and SBNation are fairly large, so they support something about the launch of the site because they thought they would get advertising revenue.

The people acting as if this is a conflict of interest clearly don't know shit about advertising.
 
I

iammeiam

Member
I did think it was fittingly tone-deaf of the documentary to, in their episode about advertising, feature that little interview with the president of Curbed.com talking about how advertisers are transparent and aren't up to anything shady or trying to influence covereage. Mostly because it hasn't really been that long since the full story about Gertsmanngate came out, and it feels weird for the bright shining future of games journalism to do an entire episode about advertising and not mention it.

I'd also really be curious to know what their November ad sell at that point really was, which was just sort of brushed aside, given that they've apparently got MS falling all over themselves to shell out money for things aside from the website.
 
G

GillianSeed79

Member
DocSeuss said:
The people acting as if this is a conflict of interest clearly don't know shit about advertising.
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The advertising people acting as if this isn't a conflict of interest clearly don't know shit about editorial.

The Polygon excuse that, oh, the NYT times has adverts for smart cars and writes about smart cars is idiotic. Advertising and editorial are two different departments and never should the twain meet.
The ad rep selling the ad to the smart car ad rep exist in a completely different ecosystem in a completely different department.

This is basic journalism ethics 101.
 
S

saunderez

Member
Margalis said:
Their review of Lollipop Chainsaw was terrible. Does that count?
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It does for me. 1/4 of the review was about the game, 3/4 of the review was bitching about how misogynistic it is. The soapboxing needs to stop, I don't care where your moral compass points just tell me about the game.
 
B

Bobby Roberts

Banned
DocSeuss said:
Yeah, I missed that. Still, similar logic follows. Microsoft knows that Vox is launching a new site, and that Vox and SBNation are fairly large, so they support something about the launch of the site because they thought they would get advertising revenue.

The people acting as if this is a conflict of interest clearly don't know shit about advertising.
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You keep using the word "Support" as if this was a pre-existing idea that came from editorial that needed ad money to see it to fruition. That would be one thing.

But they didn't "support" this idea. They came up with it. They approached Polygon. The documentary about Polygon didn't exist until Microsoft a) suggested it and then b) paid for it.

There's a vast gulf of difference between the two. This isn't like, say, Bill Simmons at ESPN telling everyone there "I have an idea for a documentary series," and then ESPN saying "Great idea. Lets get sales on the case, see if we can financially support this thing."

This would be like Coca Cola approaching ESPN and saying "I want you guys to do a documentary series about ESPN, and open every single video with a big dubstep ad about Coca Cola." ESPN says "Huh, I dunno" and then Coke drops a thick check on their heads.

Editorial and Sales are supposed to intermingle minimally. Not at all, ideally, although that's almost impossible at this point. But at the least - sales is not supposed to be steering the content. And that's what's happened here. Editorial is in charge of how it looks/plays, yes, but Editorial was essentially pressured into doing a story ON THEMSELVES, by sales.

That doesn't look good.
 
3

345triangle

Member
GillianSeed79 said:
The advertising people acting as if this isn't a conflict of interest clearly don't know shit about editorial.

The Polygon excuse that, oh, the NYT times has adverts for smart cars and writes about smart cars is idiotic. Advertising and editorial are two different departments and never should the twain meet.
The ad rep selling the ad to the smart car ad rep exist in a completely different ecosystem in a completely different department.

This is basic journalism ethics 101.
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right, and that's the case at vox; there is a sales team that works these things out and has next to no interaction with the editorial side. while press reset is a little different in that the feature is directly sponsored, the salient point is that it's not editorial content and doesn't promote internet explorer itself. it's a self-referential documentary featuring a bunch of macs running chrome or safari.

sponsored editorial content is when i read something like edge and see a feature written/laid out in the magazine's style but directly promoting one company's products.
 
E

eznark

Banned
345triangle said:
right, and that's the case at vox; there is a sales team that works these things out and has next to no interaction with the editorial side. while press reset is a little different in that the feature is directly sponsored, the salient point is that it's not editorial content and doesn't promote internet explorer itself. it's a self-referential documentary featuring a bunch of macs running chrome or safari.

sponsored editorial content is when i read something like edge and see a feature written/laid out in the magazine's style but directly promoting one company's products.
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By their own admission the editorial team did not want to do this. They were pressured by the business side to do it and they caved. That's really all I need to know to know how much influence the sales team has.
 
W

whalleywhat

Member
Goldmund said:
It's the same with studios. Sony and their PlayStation cherish first party titles, Microsoft's Xbox360 heavily relies on third party ones. Sony has the PlayStation Blog, Microsoft will sponsor Polygon. It's transparent enough.
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Makes you wonder what everyone's all up in arms about.
 
C

CorySchmitz

Junior Member
eznark said:
By their own admission the editorial team did not want to do this. They were pressured by the business side to do it and they caved. That's really all I need to know to know how much influence the sales team has.
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Whaaat? Where did you hear that? Chris was pretty pumped about it.
 
S

snap0212

Member
ShockingAlberto said:
GAF is their content

Twitter followers for @NeoGAFNewThread:

AVHK9.jpg
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Even Arthur follows, which is ironic since, according to him, he basically doesn't give a shit about GAF. :D

edit: If anyone finds the Thread that resulted from Arthur's comment, I'd apprechiate a PM. I know there was a Thread, I think it was even created by a Mod/Admin.
 
I

iammeiam

Member
7threst said:
what? I didn't realise they already made this much episodes. I was still waiting for episode 2 haha! I thought this thread would get updated when new episodes were released but I guess $750.000 got in the way of that haha.
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It is just a really bland documentary; more surface than depth so there's not much to talk about in the individual episodes, barring weird coincidences like 750,000 being a thing during the week the advertising episode was out.
 
D

Deleted member 47027

Unconfirmed Member
Einbroch said:
Man, they can do whatever they want, but that was really boring.
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Yeah, that's really it. This has been beyond bland, even as someone who has interest in that line of work, it just...I can't find any reason for this series to exist.
 
O

Osiris

I permanently banned my 6 year old daughter from using the PS4 for mistakenly sending grief reports as it's too hard to watch or talk to her
Sunflower said:
Yeah, that's really it. This has been beyond bland, even as someone who has interest in that line of work, it just...I can't find any reason for this series to exist.
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I can think of 750,000 reasons :p
 
J

JABEE

Member
Neuromancer said:
No he was fired because of his 'tone' it had nothing to do with Kane and Lynch

Also Gies already said they will not be reviewing IE9
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Yes, but Microsoft is paying for the creation of materials to promote the launch of Polygon. Microsoft is scratching their back right now.
 
O

Osiris

I permanently banned my 6 year old daughter from using the PS4 for mistakenly sending grief reports as it's too hard to watch or talk to her
Neuromancer said:
No he was fired because of his 'tone' it had nothing to do with Kane and Lynch

Also Gies already said they will not be reviewing IE9
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Funny, the record seems to show that the Gerstmann saga was entirely due to the breakdown of the divide between Advertising and Editorial:

Reason for GameSpot termination revealed

On March 15, 2012, it was announced that CBS Interactive had acquired the Giant Bomb and Comic Vine websites from Whiskey Media. CBS Interactive is the parent company of CNET, which operates GameSpot. As part of the deal, the non-disparagement agreement between Gerstmann and CNET was nullified, allowing him to finally speak publicly about his termination over four years prior. Later that evening on GameSpot's On the Spot web show, GameSpot VP John Davison appeared on camera with Gerstmann, marking Gerstmann's first appearance on the GameSpot web site since November 2007. He explained that the reason for his firing was the result of long-standing tension between the editorial staff and the new marketing staff that had recently been put in place. According to Gerstmann, the new marketing staff in place wasn't familiar with video game journalism or how to deal with annoyed publishers. He revealed that the problems began after publishing the review for Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction that went live on October 23, 2007. The review was written by Aaron Thomas and scored a 7.5 (good). The publisher, Sony Computer Entertainment America, complained to GameSpot over the score and threatened to pull their advertising money. Gerstmann, as Thomas' boss, was "called into a room" to discuss the review. He said the marketing team freaked out over Sony's threats and didn't understand how to handle threats like that. Tension continued between marketing and editorial, coming to a head after Gerstmann published his review for Kane & Lynch: Dead Men on November 13, 2007 and scored it a 6.0 (fair). His frankness of the game's quality led to the publisher, Eidos Interactive, also threatening to pull their advertising money. At the time of the review going live, the GameSpot home page was covered in ads for Kane & Lynch. Gerstmann said he was once again "called into a room" where he was sternly admonished over the review. After over two weeks of even thicker tension between marketing and editorial, Gerstmann was yet again "called into a room" and was informed he was being fired on November 29, 2007 effective immediately. He said they essentially caved to advertiser pressure despite vehemently claiming they didn't just days after the firing.

On a humorous note, during the show, Gerstmann claimed he ran into a few members of Kane & Lynch developer IO Interactive at a convention a few months after his firing. He claims one of the people he ran into said, "Yeah, Kane & Lynch wasn't a very good game." Gerstmann responded, "You should totally call up my old bosses and tell them that."
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K

Kinyou

Member
Neuromancer said:
No he was fired because of his 'tone' it had nothing to do with Kane and Lynch

Also Gies already said they will not be reviewing IE9
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Looked it up myself again, didn't even know that it was the guy who's now part of Giantbomb.

And Wikipedia makes it sound like he was fired because of publisher pressure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Gerstmann#Reason_for_GameSpot_termination_revealed

There already was a tension beforehand but the additional pressure from Eidos appears to the reason for the firing.
 
T

The Dutch Slayer

Member
B

brettchalupa

Member
Episode 5 was interesting from the viewpoint of someone who faces similar issues with working remotely and communication.

They just kind of only touched the tip of those issues and solutions, but it was a little bit neat to see they use Trello and Campfire and CampBot.

But yeah, not really an exciting episode.
 
S

sTeLioSco

Banned
DocSeuss said:
Yeah, I missed that. Still, similar logic follows. Microsoft knows that Vox is launching a new site, and that Vox and SBNation are fairly large, so they support something about the launch of the site because they thought they would get advertising revenue.

The people acting as if this is a conflict of interest clearly don't know shit about advertising.
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people know that ms isn't a charity.they don't give 750k without getting something back.

and for now,i only see an ie banner and 5 ms sponsored videos full of macs and iphones....
 
T

Tellaerin

Member
You know, part of the problem comes from the gaming community.

Whenever I hear about non-gaming companies trying to advertise "lifestyle" products (clothing, bodywash, whatever) in game-related media, they're usually being soundly mocked for even trying. Yet as long as gaming media is reliant on advertising dollars from the industry it's covering to survive, you're going to keep seeing this desire to keep their advertisers happy undercutting whatever message they may have.
 
N

Neuromancer

Member
Tellaerin said:
You know, part of the problem comes from the gaming community.

Whenever I hear about non-gaming companies trying to advertise "lifestyle" products (clothing, bodywash, whatever) in game-related media, they're usually being soundly mocked for even trying. Yet as long as gaming media is reliant on advertising dollars from the industry it's covering to survive, you're going to keep seeing this desire to keep their advertisers happy undercutting whatever message they may have.
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I did my part, I bought that gamer razor a few years back.
 
D

Deleted member 47027

Unconfirmed Member
diarrhea_pangs said:
Have any of the other press members chimed in with their take on this, either on twitter or podcasts?
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Early on, there was a lot of ridicule and defensiveness, because the teaser basically called all the other sites shitty and worthless. The defense of Polygon was "Wait for the actual episodes before you damn it!" and now that they're out, yeeeeah.
 
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