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Jason Schreier of Kotaku posts a really ominous tweet
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The real way to monetize Era would be a post Silver/Gold/Plat system like Reddit
Maybe they can finally revive actionbutton.net (unironically my favorite video game site ever)
I could see giving $15 for a Kotaku patreon on the cards. But obviously it would be better for Kotaku to keep the money it has without losing editorial Independence.
It's because no major corporation knows how to run a blog, let alone a dozen of them. They try to turn them into corporate news sites to better reap that sweet, sweet ad revenue but the writers and editorial staff know their audience and know what they want to write. Gizmodo Group also has fiercely independent and internet savvy writers who know how to leverage their following and their union doesn't hurt. They aren't a mega profitable venture but they do well for themselves and would continue to do well for themselves if let off a corporate leash.
Boom. When you dis Kotaku you dis yourself, folks. Schreier is one of the only people in the gaming press doing any kind of worthwhile investigative journalism and Tim Rogers is on fire all day every day.
Gawker was absolute garbage and deserved to get taken down. It sucks that it had to be from someone just as bad, but it was still the right thing to happen.
Anyway good for Jason that apparently he's fine hit a breaking point when all the years of Gawker shit and child pornography wasn't enough. He could/should've taken the investigative work elsewhere a long time ago.
Or maybe running a games website just isn't the most profitable thing going forward? I think people are getting a lot of their coverage in different ways these days. And less so on games journalism. Anyone can just watch a stream or lets play to see a game. You don't really need to go to a website for news - people have twitter. If you're an owner you can spend that money in other ways.
Didn't know outing gay men and distributing sex tapes was considered "reporting" nowadays. Oh wait, it isn't. :)
Honestly, Jason, Stephen, Cecilia and whoever else works for Kotaku should leave en masse and make their own new site. Those three names hold more weight than the Kotaku name anyways. This new guy who runs Kinja is a shortsighted POS and deserves for his investment to not work out for him in the worst way.
Man I was kinda non plussed about this because I forgot about Tim Rogers working for Kotaku now. I hope he lands on his feet he's the only voice in gaming I care about. And what a bassy, baritone voice it is.
He has his new game Truck Heck hopefully coming soon.
I dunno, Videoball was great but absolutely no one paid attention to it.
(Tim, if you're reading this I bought Videoball on PS4 on launch day)
it still makes zero sense to me, but whatevs. Kinja dude sucks, writers at Kotaku in 2019 are all basically great, they should GTFO and do their own thing.
oh snap!
oh lol. nah, they can leave that baggage completely behind with that vulture capitalist and establish an entirely new identity.
:( Hope tgis ends well.. Hate to think decent, great journalism is the straw that broke the came ls back here.. but that article about ad's on their site may have struck a nerve with the owners..
Well, ideally, management and the union would have an agreement where neither would burn the company to the ground, because both have an interest in continuing operations as a Big Name Company/Leader in Its Field.
However, in this case, management didn't get the memo and/or have decided that ransacking the assets of the company is preferable to profiting from continuing operations as one of the leaders in its particular field.
The death of Kotaku, if that even happens, is not going to be the end of Jason Shreier or any of the other talented people that work there. They'll continue to find work.
If Vice was smart, they'd be picking up Kotaku reporters who are looking to jump ship to join Waypoint/Vice Games. If.
What are you talking about? Vice overtook waypoint responsibility almost immediately, renamed and demoted Austin, who recently either got fired or left on his own volition. Natalie's gone, Danielle's gone, there's only Patrick, Rob and Cado left.
I love those guys but I can't imagine Vice Games getting anywhere close to the level of Independence and sourcing Jason would require for doing his thing. I surely can't remember many investigative articles by Patrick under vice, who's also really good at this. But then again that might be the general site being a mess and rarely being picked up by other news sites.
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Kotaku hasn't been batting 1000 lately, but having a site with Cecelia d'Anastasio and Jason Schrier is insane. The two best reporters in the business. Paul, Gita and Heather all produce solid blog content.Kotaku's owners are gonna have trouble just rebuilding a stable like that, especially with their reputation in the dump.
Edit: also Tim Roger's made the best critical series ever in "Let's Mosey." A series on the translation of ffvii
Edit: also Tim Roger's made the best critical series ever in "Let's Mosey." A series on the translation of ffvii
I can not like the guy's output and simultaneously complain this thread is uncomfortable with respect to that same person's own personal well-being.
A lot of unnecessary conjecture about a guy gives way to bashing the place he works for, or other places.
Many of gaming media's more prevalent and celebrity-like figures can absolutely rub someone the wrong way, but all too often it's because there so many personal digs at the person that even the slightest criticism about an article or video(or tweet in this case) in question can be construed as ad hominem attacks.
But it's Twitter - again - is what we are really talking about here as well, isn't it?
A tweet in and of itself is problematic subject matter for a thread at the best of times, let alone a news story.
A lot of unnecessary conjecture about a guy gives way to bashing the place he works for, or other places.
Many of gaming media's more prevalent and celebrity-like figures can absolutely rub someone the wrong way, but all too often it's because there so many personal digs at the person that even the slightest criticism about an article or video(or tweet in this case) in question can be construed as ad hominem attacks.
But it's Twitter - again - is what we are really talking about here as well, isn't it?
A tweet in and of itself is problematic subject matter for a thread at the best of times, let alone a news story.
Sad to see upper management ruining these sites. Such a great network of sites being butchered by ads. Glad to see the writers taking a stand though. Deadspin's "stick to sports" category is well worth visiting the site for right now =D
If things start to look really bad, maybe they can all reach out to Hulk Hogan and start looking for new owners again?
If things start to look really bad, maybe they can all reach out to Hulk Hogan and start looking for new owners again?
The GMG Union has existed since 2016 and Spanfeller and Great Hill partners agreed to respect the terms and conditions of their union contract upon purchase of the GMG brands. They got the memo and are legally bound to it, they just decided to ignore it because they don't think the union will be strong enough to fight back. However, they're part of the WGA East so they aren't as weak as one would think a new union would be.
also, unrelated to your post, just gonna say that anyone celebrating the demise of kotaku should really just give up reading entirely. just go read breitbart or some shit, maybe their brand of "journalism" will suit their pissbaby needs better
That's a big generalization there friend. I like Jason but the rest of the site ranges from mediocre to clickbait articles with the occasional why eas an article written about this.
Not celebrating the demise if there will be, but trying to write 4-5 article per day per person really shows how most of these sites write about nothing
Look at VG site publishing two articles both similar in topic as to how two high profile games are not good. Some of these sites are just dead weight
I don't disagree that the output of these websites is sometimes fluff, but a lot of that clickbait shit is a mandate on content minimums from higher-ups. I highly doubt the writers want to put out as much content as they do, as they regularly vent about burnout and exploitation. For example, I never really liked Patricia Hernandez's articles while she was at kotaku because there was so much of it, and she was so rarely on point, but she had a few gems buried in there that if she had the time or security to develop as stories, would have been much stronger. Looking at the work being put out by Jason, Cecelia, and Tim, this was the direction that Kotaku was heading. With the strength of their union contract behind them, they're able to better tackle topics that matter more to them.
and most of the articles that people bitch about are done by freelancers. Not really much you can do there.
also, kotaku & its fellow sites are blogs. They aren't newssites in the way we understand them, they are a functionally different. It says a lot about how the internet has beentotally corporatized that we don't understand what blogs are or how they're supposed to operate. You can accuse them of having an identity crisis, not being able to decide between being news or being a blog, but the results are some of the best and most inventive articles of the decade and I wouldn't have it any other way.
does anyone remember how dire game journalism was before Kotaku, Giant Bomb, etc? Those magazines taught me how to read, so loving EGM and GameNOW as much as I do, most of the Ziff Davis lineup was Collegebro popcorn junk, Nintendo Power & OPM were corporate propaganda, and Game Informer was hostile and miserable with clear bias oozing from their pages. Game Informer today is much better than it was in 2005, and we have the influence of sites like Kotaku to thank for that. What IGN is today, every magazine and website was in 2005. Kotaku made it its mission to expand what was considered "acceptable" to cover in the gaming press, and we're better for it.
I've been begging him to port ZiGGURAT to another platform for years.
Won't be as harsh as the "nothing is lost" guy but kotaku is not a good site and has only gotten worse
I hope Jason is able to find work soon though - does important work no one else in the industry does
I hope Jason is able to find work soon though - does important work no one else in the industry does
Kotaku is a very irregular site: it can have some of the most clickbaity headlines and disposable articles around, and the next minute hit you with an excellent investigative journalism piece. But I'm really sad to see them going through this, if only for the second part.
Here's hoping this turns out for the better, or that this team ends up somewhere better and we can still enjoy their great reporting (and podcasting, really like listening to Splitscreen).
Here's hoping this turns out for the better, or that this team ends up somewhere better and we can still enjoy their great reporting (and podcasting, really like listening to Splitscreen).
Cecilia D'Anastasio, also from Kotaku, uncovered the Riot rampant sexist culture. She needs to be recognized as well.
I don't doubt there are others - but my only experience has been jason's stuff
This is almost every single publication ever, even before the internet. Its how you're able to pay a journalist for days, months, or even years to chase a particular story.
It's weird, before, when flicking through a good newspaper or magazine, if an article or section didn't appeal to us, we'd page past it and often happily consume only a fraction of the entire publication. But something changed with the internet - suddenly everything must be for us all the time, all killer no filler, and if that isn't the case (and it never is) we judge them incredibly harshly for it.
Saying that the site is not good and then admitting that you only pay attention to one writer's stuff.
Ok.
This so much. People touting the "journalistic excellence" of the New York Times probably aren't reading it for the Style section or whatever. But they also aren't begrudging that section for its existence.