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.
I've written news on and off for GameSpot for three years. The rate used to be $25 for 200 words, it's now $30. This is unbearable, but it's actually pretty high for a games site. I used to edit for a Gamurs website that paid half as much per news story and once tried to raise the minimum requirement per story to 300 words without a pay increase. There are way more of those tiny SEO farms than there are GameSpots and IGNs.
All this is to say.
if you are writing for $30 (or less) you are motivated to work fast and loose, even to pick up stories that won't require much effort or research because you are not going to be compensated enough for any work you do beyond the minimum. I don't think I'm a bad news writer by any means, but I feel the limitations of payment on what I can do for basically every article I write. Even editors can also be swamped editing dozens of individual stories a day. GameSpot has some amount of guaranteed traffic, as it's a big name. But smaller sites have to scramble for every crumb (also I'm sure their advertisers pay even less). Which means both a shotgun strategy and speed. The only way you can get higher SEO than a bigger site is to either publish things faster than they can or make a bite-sized guide or news tidbit that is less useful, but more likely to get picked up on a google search.
Doing this, a freelancer can make enough money to scratch out something like a living, but they have to work fast and be incredibly efficient (which as you can imagine shunts off people with mental illness or disabilities who can do fantastic work but just need more time or support). Full-time jobs also get dangled like carrots, but these too are more likely given to white men, there aren't very many of them, and there is a strong likelihood you will just be laid off. One freelance writer I worked with at Gamurs was hired and then laid off before his health insurance card arrived in the mail.
These are all just compounding issues that are discussed above (many of which are the real sources of these dynamic, why hire a team of staff writers when you can use the same amount of money to pay more freelancers less). But I do think staffers tend to have the largest voices, while the people often most negatively and materially affected by the current form of games journalism are freelancers.
PS I'm in the National Writer's Union/Freelance Solidarity Project and I'm actively involved with trying to kick up efforts around these issues. If you are freelancer who works in games or otherwise maybe reach out!
