Do paid bloggers and news sites need to check facts more?
Sep 23rd, 2008 by shuttler
Don’t get me wrong here, I think we need paid bloggers and games journalists. The community thrives well from this information and it’s great to see longterm podcasters and bloggers getting some reward for efforts over the years.
When like myself you devote a large chunk of your spare time to a game such as I did with Tabula Rasa and blogged heavily and ran a podcast on it for the playerbase, interacted with NCSoft and made a real effort to report factually on the news. It becomes very frustrating when large respected games sites produce rumours that can be detrimental to player subscription levels and devalue the opinion of the game for example. This of course is just one example, sometimes the rumours are true, but often they are not and can cause the developers to have to do a lot of fire fighting.
So this morning I’m driving to a client and I am listening to one of my favourite podcasts, the CAGCast with Cheapy and Wombat. It turns out that they made a small competition just to see if somone listening could post a fake bit of news on their personal blog and see if it was picked up by one of the major sites.
A listener sure enough put together a 2 sentance blog post and took a photo of a fake memo he had clearly written in word and printed out without any headed paper or anything fancy like that and posted it. Within hours this blog post is a main news feature on sites like Kotaku, Joystiq and Gizmodo!
I find this lack of investigation worrying and like I said, bad rumours cause trouble. I thought this might get picked up somewhere but not on these 3 big players sites.
It’s a shame that paid bloggers are often forced into making posts that generate hits rather than just delivering interesting news. Having to hit a monthly blog quota or indeed getting a bonus for extra hits means the systems are open to abuse and some people clearly will post anything that makes a story. Even if it isn’t the truth.
Sure, getting paid per post is a screwed up system, but many many jobs operate on a commission. It’s the nature of the beast.
When you go to buy a used car from a used car lot, the salesman is paid by commission, so he will try to sell you whatever he can to make the most profit. This gives these salesmen the reputation of being lying bastards who will do anything for a buck. Why are there still so many used car lots if everyone hates car salesmen? Selection. These car lots will probably have anything you want all in one handy place. And if you don’t like what they have one day, they’ll have a whole new inventory tomorrow.
Blogging for pay is still in its infant stages, so it has its faults. Hopefully it will become refined enough to stick around, because if all gaming news was brought to us by Adam Sessler and whatever hot girl G4 decided to hire this week, you would never get the variety and turnaround that you get today. Only the biggest and best stories would be mentioned, and the little man would be left in the dust.
Lying bloggers (bastards) like those who report false news or indeed ‘over-sell’ us at car lots, give bloggers like you bad name.
Not that this is about you personaly Shawn, but it must be difficult reporting the cool little stories when under pressure to get the next big scoop.
I’ve always loved the fact you keep it genuine despite these pressure, but I see others who don’t and the proof is in this hoax.
Its the laughable nature of fact checking on the internet, in print media you check facts with various sources to see if they are aware of the rumour, thus corroborating it in some way.
On the internet, fact checking is seemingly done by checking if its posted anywhere else and given the linking nature of the net and how google still suffers from blog google-bombing, its not hard for that to occur within a short space of time.
When it comes to such a closed source such as an mmo (where even the financials are withheld fiercly), surely its hard to do any kind of in-depth reporting anyway.