Charles Arthur on Heat magazine’s offensive stickers:
But what drove Heat to such a massive misjudgement? This is a magazine that used to know its readers, and when I used to pick it up, the feeling I got was that it didn’t think its readers were cruel. But this was cruel; heartless; thoughtless. It lacked compassion.
So what’s happened to Heat? Competition.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun on the apparent firing by CNet of a veteran games writer. His crime? Giving Kane & Lynch a less than stellar review:
Our very reliable source tells us that while Gerstmann wasn’t the most popular man with the CNET owners, it was his Kane & Lynch review alone that saw him fired. You see, Eidos had just spent huge, huge amounts of money securing massive advertising across the site, skinning the entire front page with K&L commercials, along with running gimmick adverts allowing readers to cut their own K&L trailers. So a 6 wasn’t exactly the mark they were hoping for.
Comments
0 responses to “Two unrelated and rather depressing stories about journalism”
I think saying Heat Magazine deserves to be labelled “journalism” is pushing it a bit far ;)
Either way, whoever came up with that sticker is a poor excuse for a human being
Am I the only person who thinks it’s a bit strange to fire the guy for lowballing your sponsor, but only after actually publishing the low scoring review?
I mean if you care enough to ditch someone over it, then surely you can do that, then drag some other hack into your office and effectively say: review this game and think about happened to your predecessor before submitting a score.
Actually I’ve just read the recent edits on rock, paper, shotgun and they seem to be thinking along these lines too…
I guess I’m cynical enough to be believe someone would do that – but not enough to believe that they’d do it so stupidly.
Penny Arcade were on about this the other week. Their take on it is that they won’t accept advertising for a game unless they are given a playable version of it and it looks good.