Interested in writing for VG news/review website

Sicotic87

Sicotic87

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I'm interested in writing reviews, or news, for a video game website. Obviously, the bigger names are gonna be out of my reach for now, but if someone wants to start working on something, I'm definitely interested :lol:
 
plenty of sites that take volunteers, or pay something like $100 a month for an article a day :rofl:

total abuse, really, they just want free content and will take whoever is willing. never contribute to a site for free unless you're allowed to spread your material elsewhere, and they will rarely let you do that.

you're better off just writing your own stuff and spreading it around
 
I sympathize with you, Sicotic. Best advice I can give you is to start a blog or start volunteering so you can get your work out there, and be relentless about looking for opportunities. The big outlets may seem out of reach, and likely are, but it's still worth trying to contact them. Even if you can't land a gig with them, you can still try to pick their brains about how the editors there got started, what their work day consists of, etc.

Also, I've always found this little snippet from an old Dtoid post about Jim Sterling to be a font of motivation and inspiration:

How did you get hired to Destructoid?Basically, I'd spent many years wasting my life, wandering without any sense of purpose or direction. I tried a career as a live comedian, both sketches and stand up, but results were mixed. I was always a writer at heart though, even though I never truly accepted it. I spent most of my time writing at my personal baby, Morphine Nation, which was/is social commentary and very angry, curse-laden rantings. I had a small amount of cult success with that, but never anything spectacular. At the same time, I used to drop game reviews for a friend's website, Project Wonderboy and occassionally Earth-2. I'd always been heavily complimented on my game reviews, and told I should go professional, but for some reason I never took the idea seriously.

Skip to this year, I just decided one day that I would seriously pursue a career as a video game reviewer. I emailed a bunch of magazines, to little effect, but in only two weeks suddenly found myself talking to David Clayman at IGN Insider and we talked about doing some freelance work. I'd scored a commission with him, but sadly missed out on a regular job with Insider, mostly because of my location. Still looking for places, I bought a copy of GamesTM magazine which had an article written by our very own William Haley about jobs in the games industry, one of which was games journalism. He'd featured Destructoid quite heavily in the writeup, so I briefly checked it out and, not expecting much in a reply, emailed Niero with a very general, copy/paste "Hey, luv ur site, here is sum samples can I haz be doin revewz for u?" message.

Imagine my surprise when our robotic hero messaged me back saying "Hey, yeah cool, we have a spot open on the news team." I don't know what I did to win both he and Nick over, but they very quickly hired me aboard and threw me out there with no introduction, leading to the now infamous "Who the f*** is Jim Sterling?" meme I've come to know and hear about 80,000,000 times in just one visit to Stickam.
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Edit: Also, it should go without saying, but back your articles up. Nothing worse than spending a year writing for a website only to find out one day that it has been shut down leaving you without easy access to your work.
 
If you want a paying gig, you more or less have to know someone or get to know someone. That's how I started freelancing for 1up, at least.

And no, I'm not doing that anymore, so don't ask.

In the meantime, build up a portfolio of shit to show people in hiring positions.
 
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