Quote: Originally Posted by Mooby Not intending to offend anyone. Nor persuade others to agree with my opinion. It's not one I developed just for the sake of being anti-establishment or whatever and, if you're so inclined, you can check out an article here that I largely agree with and points out a number of issues. It's not a matter of 'large scale payoffs' rather these people's livelihoods/jobs depend on their relationships with publishers. Hence, 'cottage industry.' Otherwise, I'm not prone to conspiracy theories, aliens did 9/11, Illuminati, what have you. Totally subconscious of me. I guess when a term is floating around in my head it'll get used in multiple instances when I put hand to keyboard. Or... was it subconscious...

From reading about half of that article so far (I'm going to finish it, but this is the internet and you should never ever read an entire article before stating your opinion about it) I can certainly agree with most, if not all the points that are brought up. But I think that most of the worst offenders aren't who I would consider games journalists (sites like Polygon and RPS, as I stated before) but the massive games enthusiast blogging community that attempts to pass its work off as journalism. Those are the people that get swayed by swag and free flights. When the guys who have been covering games since the mid-90's get offered a free flight to Hawaii, they're just pissed off because you're taking up four days to do what you could have done at their office in San Francisco in an afternoon.

And I only feel comfortable calling the sites that I do examples of journalism because if you take at least sites like Polygon and Giant Bomb (almost exclusively Patrick Klepek's work) they're attempting to do features that require investigation and reporting rather than simply reprinting or responding to PR releases.