Exposed: The Secret Mailing List of the Gaming Journalism Elite

[entropy13]

Several prominent gaming journalists across America are part of a secret mailing list on which they discuss what to cover, what to ignore, and what approach their coverage should take to breaking news, Breitbart can reveal.

High-profile editors, reporters, and reviewers from heavyweight gaming news sites such as Polygon, Ars Technica, and Kotaku use the private Google Groups mailing list, which is called Gaming Journalism Professionals or GameJournoPros, to shape industry-wide attitudes to events, such as the revelation that developer Zoe Quinn had a sexual relationship with at least one prominent games journalist -- a journalist who had mentioned her and her products in his reporting.

Emails seen by Breitbart from August of this year show Kyle Orland, a senior gaming editor at Ars Technica, discussing the Zoe Quinn scandal. He wrote: "I don't want to in essence reward the jerks doing this by giving their 'issue' any attention at all ... I'm not even going to give the bullshit 'journalism ethics' excuse for these attacks the time of day."

Orland continued: "I would LOVE to use my platform to reproach this kind of behavior... but that would go against Quinn's valid and understandable desire not to have this personal matter publicized by the media... Maybe we should just stick to Twitter to boost the signal on this one, rather than our 'front pages.'"

"Maybe we should get a public letter of support going around decrying these kinds of personal attacks, signed by as many sympathetic journalists/developers as we can," he wrote. "Maybe we should just use this as an excuse to give more attention to her work... I know I've been meaning to review Depression Quest since its Steam release."



Full article here.

 

[rooivalk]

tl;dr

I don't think there's a media that is purely neutral.

Many modern media are subtlety or shamelessly open sided anyway.
Some go back the republican some democrat, some to Xbox some to Playstation, the same goes for its readers (and hence comments).
In my country, every serious political candidate (especially presidential candidate) must have at least one major media corporation support.

Maybe this is a good news since they're reporting news with some sort of democracy behind it lol.

Rambling: In my opinion, gawker sites like Kotaku and Jalopnik are the worst offenders.
Their editors love to spout pretty subjective opinion and get angry when somebody called them not a journalist, but when confronted, they're quick to remind everyone that their sites are blogs with a bit of journalism thrown into it.
I actually like to see people opinion (including editor's) but please don't be a hypocrite.

 

[RCoon]

A bunch of journalists have other journalists on their mailing lists?

Well, yeah.

I have a massive mailing list of all other IT people in schools so we can discuss things to go forward in the best way, and avoid all the pitfalls.
The entire gaming industry of developers and marketers gave other devs and people from other teams on mailing lists, they all communicate.

These people are trying to support a woman fighting for the rights of women who is getting death and rape threats on all forms of social media. If it was me, I'd also write a public letter on all of those journalism websites, bashing those scum sucking teenage kids.

 

[SaltyFish]

So... video game "journalism" isn't immune to mass media control? Who knew?

 

[Deleted member 67555]

Yeah a bunch of journalists have other journalists on their mailing lists....
Nothing wrong with collectively giving people their opinions, right?
No reason to stay independent when the sheeple flock to their herder anyways....

 

[Lopez0101]

ArsTechnica is one of my favorite sites and their reviews are usually much better than most gaming sites'. Hell, their articles are the best as well. Clickbaiting and sensationalism is usually fairly low at Ars.

But you have to remember, at lot of these big sites are all owned by the same two or three companies. At least Ars usually flat out states a lot of the time what company pays them when an article might insight assumptions of collusion or something.