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.
