i think the difference between a casual blogger and a journalist is that journalists confirm sources and check basic information by asking people who would know, before writing an article
with apologies to most of modern game journalism for saying so
It's depressing honestly, i used to be the biggest advocate in the world to other devs that game journalism was doing important work and critical analysis mattered but now we're at a point where polygon is crossposting low quality tiktok explainers to their front page and it's like. idk. What I loved is gone. It left. It was destroyed.
The thing that depresses me as someone who came out of a five year career in games press is that people want to do this work. People don't get into journalism to write Top 10 Black Friday SSD Deals posts. But before too long you realise the demands of playing to ad rev and SEO have destroyed the ability to put time into good critique and journalism, or that the long term institutional knowledge at these outlets simply doesn't exist to train new writers.
We should have beaten off the ad people wanting to infect the internet with BNC cables back then
(those terminators could really sting)
