18th July 2011, 8:27 PM
Quote:As for "paying the bills", cut the fluff. No news show needs a "situation room". Every last news report can be given in front of a simple wooden desk in front of a blue screen, no exceptions. Any news site that wants to stand out just needs to prove their worth, just like any newspaper did.
Newspapers and magazines cut the "fluff" years and years ago. They've been cutting off slabs of meat ever since, gutting their reporting desks, overseas bureaus, and more. Only the very richest papers can now afford to have solid overseas desks, such as the New York Times; even major ones like the Chicago Tribune and LA Times don't anymore. And magazines... yeah, it's bad.
You don't quite understand how much trouble journalism is in because of the internet, do you?
I mean, I understand 100% why it's a problem -- I don't want to pay for news either, not when I can get it for free! And I don't really, I don't subscribe to a newspaper for now for instance, or newsmagazines (though I may someday if they're still around and I make more money). But the effects of that that is doing to the field of reporting is incontestable and very bad. Bloggers are not reporters, not really. Heck, news blogs are just reporting on reports FROM newspapers, more often than not -- and if those papers are making no money, then how can they continue to do that work? They can't. So they fire the people, and the public at large suffers.
Quote:Web sites CAN have investigative journalists though. Just look at some of the gaming news sites, where people actually do call developers and organize interviews.
I probably would agree that there's less difference between gaming website staffs and magazine staffs, if just because gaming reporting, as I said, isn't exactly that good... so yeah, this probably does have less of an impact on gaming than other things, there just wasn't anywhere near as far for it to fall. That doesn't mean that I don't think supporting a magazine like PCG isn't a good thing though, I very much do.
Quote:Anyway, I really don't care about video game news magazines. Their information is late compared to the internet, and videos say a lot more than any picture. As for demo disks, download them. The argument of being "exposed to games you otherwise might not try" applies equally well to demos on the front page of the big online game stores, only better because it can be updated quicker than once a month.
You don't read gaming magazines, do you? And on that note, have you ever read an issue of PC Gamer? Because this has nothing to do with the kind of content a magazine like PCG is about... you're right, magazines don't often break news anymore (though they do once in a while). They try to make up for that with other content; there's usually a few pages of news, but it's not the focus because lots of people will have seen that stuff already. Instead they do exclusive reveals, reviews, articles, columns, and the like -- other content that's as good or better than anything online.
First, as with all magazines, there's short letters and news sections, and previews as well. These are less important now than they used to be, sure, but magazines do sometimes still get exclusives and they're often interesting anyway.
But beyond that, for instance, PCG's columns have always been one of my favorite features about the magazine. For a while in the mid '00s they really had cut back on them severely, but they've since restored them to their former glory, and now PCG's five columns are almost always interesting. As always they cover some nonstandard things, too -- PCG still has a wargaming-focused column and a sim column (like, racing sims, flight sims, tank sims, sub sims, etc), for instance, as well as an RPG column and several others. PCG has also added an MMOs section, with several pages of content about MMOs and the like, which makes sense given the importance of the genre to PC gaming now.
And also, they have articles. As I mentioned above, for instance, the latest issue has a five page long article about graphic adventure games, what went wrong with them over the last decade-plus, and what this author thinks can and should be done with the genre. It's pretty interesting, I bet you'd find the article interesting.
And finally, of course, they have reviews, mostly of games, but also of some hardware. PCG has always reviewed a good volume of games; while something like Game Informer reviews very few games each month, almost all major titles for the PS3/360, PCG reviews titles both major and minor. They review things that IGN and the like usually would never would even cover, for instance, like, well, wargames. This issue has 14 pages of reviews (pages with text on them, there are three more with just images).
Of course I would say that a magazine is a suppliment. It's not going to be your primary news source of course, and as they are limited for space reviews will usually not be as long in a magazine as they can be online. But a good magazine can be an interesting, well worth reading product anyway. That's definitely what I think about them, at least -- even if they certainly aren't as important as they used to be, and in some ways that's a good thing (being able to get news quickly over the internet is great!), they have managed to stay relevant and interesting, I would say. At least, some of them have.
Quote:The internet is the future of news. As protocols allow it to be more closely intertwined and more convenient in places where radio and TV currently stand, it'll be less and less appealing to bother with the "steady feed of whatever we want to you watch/hear" method. There will still be a place for it, emergency broadcasts mostly, but heck even "up to the minute" stuff can be managed via RSS feeds. I don't currently subscribe to "feeds" myself because most of what I check up on I don't care to have a constant update on, but soon that'll change when things like official weather warning channels and presidential announcement channels get going.This really doesn't have much to do with magazines, but as for other mediums while you feel that way lots of people do still watch TV shows. Yes, they'd rather watch them when they want to (understandable, having to follow their schedule is annoying), but plenty of people do still like that kind of thing...
And remember, returning to the top of this post and serious news -- news doesn't come from a vacuum. It comes from reporters paid to do their work, by news organizations who have resources. The analysis comes from similar types. How does this happen in a world where everyone reads free online news feeds? Where does the money to pay the reporters and maintain the news organizations come from? Web ads, so far, simply don't pay enough to maintain that kind of thing. Some papers now are trying to set up paywalls, like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and others have in various forms, but we'll see if even that works... who wants to pay when you can find stuff (even if it's not as good) elsewhere online for free? The problem is, without those serious news sources, those free ones online suffer too.
Basically, the internet has completely messed up the worlds of television, radio, movies, music, videogames, news, and more, damaged all of their business models severely, and there's no clear picture of what the result is going to be...
Of course this isn't all bad, I love a lot of aspects of the internet for sure! But good or bad it is interesting to think about.