#oneaday Day 375: What a Mess!

Been idly following this whole Gematsu-Niche Gamer spat today and I'm super-glad I'm out of this side of things in the business.

For the unfamiliar, earlier on today, Gematsu's Sal Romano questioned where Niche Gamer was sourcing some of their stories from, when he knew full well that he had broken the stories in question. Although many of Gematsu's news stories consist of maybe a paragraph of introductory text followed by a copy of a press release, it's important to note that Romano (who runs Gematsu pretty much solo, I believe) puts in a lot of work sourcing and translating Japanese press releases as well as the stuff that typically makes the rounds to Western journos.

Further investigation revealed that this had been going on since at least 2015 or so, and Niche Gamer's bossman blamed it on a "ghost writer" who had since been terminated rather than actually owning up to the situation. It was a no-win situation, of course, with Niche's reputation taking a hit either way, but at least an honest apology and acknowledgement of the problem would have scored a few brownie points with people.

Looking back on my time on the news shift, this sort of thing unfortunately isn't all that uncommon; very little "games journalism" on the news side of things involves actual journalism. A lot of it is rewording press releases and a lot of it is putting your own spin on stories from other places. The key thing is that you need to provide something actually unique rather than just changing a few words around: some editorialisation, some commentary, some context, some history.

I used to be pretty good at this, even on the slowest of slow news days, and indeed during my time at GamePro I was specifically complimented for my stories (quite a few of which were interesting things I spotted via social media that other sites hadn't picked up on) being a strong source of traffic for the site; sadly not enough to prevent parent company IDG closing the bloody place down, of course, but at least the site's failure wasn't my "fault"!

When I knew that I was going to have to depart USgamer thanks to being laid off, I started MoeGamer with a clear vision and intention in mind: I was not ever going to be a "news site". I'd seen all too many hobbyist bloggers trying to copy the Kotaku-style news churn and just not get anywhere; there was absolutely no point in it. And, as we can see with today's situation, when complacency creeps in, mistakes can be made that can cause significant problems.

That's why MoeGamer has never been about "timely", short-form, reactive content; it's always been about "timeless", in-depth, long-form articles. A good game is a good game forever, so it doesn't matter about when I write about it. I'm not chasing traffic, I'm not breaking stories; I'm writing about games that interest me or that are significant in some way or another. Sometimes these are brand new games — such as the current feature on Pokémon — and sometimes they're years, even decades old. This ties in with the Atari A to Z project, too; those games are twenty to thirty years old in many cases, but they're still just as interesting and relevant today.

The other advantage of this is that it forces me to be original and unique. I can't fake what I do. I can't plagiarise what I do, because it relies on personal experiences and individual research. I'm super proud of that side of what I do, and on days like today it really makes me feel pretty good about the work that I do. I don't wish that to sound arrogant or anything, but… yeah. After seeing the ongoing arguments today I'm happy that I'm well out of it doing my own thing in my own distinctive way.

I hope Romano gets some sort of "justice" out of this; I'm not talking necessarily in a legal sense, but he works his ass off breaking a variety of Japanese gaming-related news, so I hope his hard work is appropriately acknowledged. And while I don't wish ill on Niche Gamer — Brandon over there has had kind words to say to me in the past, so I know there's at least some good in there! — I hope this situation causes them to take a very thoughtful look at how they do things from hereon.