Jason Schreier Leaving Kotaku

[J4MES OX4D 9,779]

A huge departure for the industry which could be the final nail in the coffin for Kotaku. Schreier was probably the most recognised gaming journalist out there and had some huge stories over the years including the Anthem exposure. He was also the only one at Kotaku who didn't use the site to peddle their personal political propaganda and actually went out of his way to do proper journalism rather than generate articles from source material on Twitter and from other rival sites. 

 

Videogame journalism has been going down the toilet for many years and he was one of just a few that did their jobs properly.  He was able to break barriers to get big news and people involved in the industry felt comfortable in reaching out to him to air their grievances.  It'll be interesting to see where Kotaku goes now - their owners G/O media are constantly battling their own staff to ensure articles are gaming related and don't drift off into political nonsense and without the one real journalist they had left, it could be a right shitshow. 

[phil bottle 9,567]

G/O Media are the shit heads in this scenario. How they handled taking over, adding intrusive video ads into their sites, breaking agreement with editorial policy etc etc is a reason he's leaving.

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[J4MES OX4D 9,779]

12 minutes ago, phil bottle said:

G/O Media are the shit heads in this scenario. How they handled taking over, adding intrusive video ads into their sites, breaking agreement with editorial policy etc etc is a reason he's leaving.

Their takeover seemed pretty hostile but the state of the publications particularly Deadspin at the time had to lead to pretty rapid and ruthless action because of the damage being done. The old owners cut their losses as finances were obliterated and key advertising was lost.

 

Kotaku and Deadspin in particular were becoming known for ignoring their focuses of Sports and Gaming and instead writers using the domains to write personally-driven political articles unrelated to their topics. G/O came in quite heavy-handed and gave them a simple ultimatum - do your job properly or resign. The Deadspin editor got sacked outright for their past performance and the Kotaku staff on the other side then all banded around against the people that were paying their wages throwing all sorts of crazy accusations and statements like ''How am I supposed to write about games and not mention politics''

 

Schreier was a bit of a baby at times especially on Twitter but he was probably the only staff on their books that did the job properly and got results for their work. Back in the 90's every videogame journalist used to operate to this standard but nowadays a lot of writers use their position to get personal and then don't like it when their bosses finally pull them up about it. 

[phil bottle 9,567]

Yeah, the guy who sacked the Deadspin editor ended up resigning himself.

I have no problem with journalists talking about politics, politics effects everything we do, there's political bias in everything written anywhere, intended ir not, but certainly there's a balance to be had and if you're paid to write about Sports then you should be writing about sports.

In this case I understand that publication editors put up a post about how they were unhappy with the over the top adverts, which was removed at orders of G/O, which itself was against agreements made around editorial control.

I don't read any of these publications since the advent of click bait and paid for reviews, so it's hard to judge, or give a fuck to be honest. [emoji846]

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[GazzaGarratt 10,867]

He was the only one I read from Kotaku, mainly through his Twitter feed. He could've left without the issues behind the scenes because of his connections and decent write ups.