In the process of catching up with some of my reading, I read through this news post about a piece of games journalism being called shoddy by a game developer posted by Ars Technica.

The story is that information about Borderlands 2, an unannounced game from Gearbox, was leaked to Eurogamer by a non-Public Relations source and that Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford responded by calling the story a piece of “shoddy journalism”, despite the fact that the story was completely true and acquired from a reliable source.

To anyone outside games or technology journalism, getting information on an unannounced consumer product may not seem like a massive scoop and getting upset about it might seem an odd thing to do, but games have become a phenomenally big business with grand and expensive marketing strategies backing them up.  The announcement of a title is carefully planned so as to build appropriate levels of hype before a game is released.  If a game is announced too soon, the hype might die off and if it is announced to late, there won’t be enough time to saturate your demographic with reasons for them to buy it.

I’ll be the first to say I’m not on board with the hype machine that gets everyone excited about what is coming up as opposed to the mountain of titles that everyone was excited about last month and are already out, but this is still far from shoddy journalism, it’s just getting information from a source that isn’t a PR spokesman.

Journalists are trained to try and talk to someone who will say interesting things to breath life into a story.  They are often told to try not to settle for a PR spokesperson as you won’t often get anything interesting from them and instead to lean on their sources to try and get more juicy inside information.  In general terms, this is happening all the time.  Journalists are trying to get to the juicy centre of the information and PR agents are running interference with this and trying to steer them to the bits they want covered and acting as a guard for anything that might make their client look bad.  As an extreme example of what I mean, the News of the World phone hacking story was not acquired through a News International Public Relations agent.

In the gaming world it appears that the balance of power leans much more towards PR companies.  They are used to being able to send out any old press release and getting it instantly posted, even if it’s just a couple of screen shots or an incremental update on development.  During the San Diego Comic Con, I actually received a press release that was just a .jpeg with a title and a date.  No pictures, no indication of what the date was in relation to, no indication of whether it was even a film, a game, a comic, or a light opera, just a word and a date.  Maybe it was to encourage people to call up and ask what it was about, which wouldn’t have been bad at all, but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone managed to spin a few hundred words out of just the title or just posted it as it stood.

I find it distressing that a lot of games journalists seem to be unable to break out from under the drip feed of information from PR companies.  I am well aware that at the moment, I’m probably no better, but I don’t want to learn to rely on that or get in to bad habits.  I want to be able to do actual journalism instead of just making the lives of PR representatives easier.

If I want to do PR work, I’ll do PR work.  It tends to be better paid and where the lines are drawn seems less ambiguous, even if there are undoubtedly all manner of interesting complexities to the job.  I don’t want to live as part of the PR machine out of fear that I might get blacklisted, and hearing about what has happened to Ars before when they have accidentally disrupted a company’s marketing plan, I want to try and stay as far away from the hype machine as possible.

The one thing that bothers me over everything else however is that it doesn’t really matter because vast numbers of readers of gaming sites have come to associate screenshots and PR statements as news and have come to expect it.  I realised this because it was almost what I thought was newsworthy when I started my internship at Bit-Tech.  Gaming editor Joe Martin saw to it that one of my first lessons was to avoid reporting the hyperbole in press releases which is something that few seem able to achieve and is a trap that I still occasionally fall in to.

I think this one might be an impossible problem.  The audience expects what a lot of sites give them which in turn fuels the expectations of PRs which then makes it difficult for any site that is dependant on said PRs for products to review or invites to press events to do anything other than act as a company mouthpiece for whoever is releasing information.

I don’t know the answer and in all honesty I have only recently understood that there is a question.