We here at No More Lives were working on our next posts, when we came across a misleading headline on Kotaku titled, How Dumbed Down Acting is Creating Dumbed Down Games. The post linked to the voice acting discussion over at Michael Abbot’s exceptional blog, The Brainy Gamer, and if you, like us, read the actual article you know how misrepresentative this headline is. The resulting summary, however, by Brian Crecente does a functional job of accurately explaining Michael’s piece, but it fails to mitigate the expectation the sensational headline casts on the entire post.
This incident, once again, highlights a real issue with Kotaku: a history of jumbled content, lack of consistent copy-editing, and a schizophrenic editorial stance. While it has become hip to sneer at Kotaku, there is a real soul searching issue at heart that is bigger than the site: the essential need for a legitimate news & criticism website aggregator for the gaming industry.
Whether you disagree with the business and journalism philosophy of Kotaku, they do deliver what they promise to deliver—a fast food tapas (or parasitic tonic, depending on who you ask) of game related news. Contrary to a general belief that linking away from one’s site is considered detrimental to one’s own traffic by shortening a reader’s engagement, Nielsen online ratings of major news sites have shown that news aggregation sites like The Drudge Report retain a readership that has twice the session numbers per user and almost twice the user time than any major news outlets. In short, aggregation pays.
With an estimated readership, depending on the source, of around 50,000 to 1.2 million, Kotaku has the base to establish itself as a legitimate and competent news and criticism aggregator—it has the power to educate and inform. Instead, among the stories and headlines it gets right, are frustratingly inconsistent posts ranging from cosplay cleavage, game reviews, and irrelevant personal missives. When good or well-intended posts or articles do appear, they get lost in the shuffle of the 60-plus daily posts. If you assume the role of a news aggegator, or make your revenue based on such activities, then you have a responsibility to provide clean, professional, and accurate summaries…. consistently. Furthermore, apart from content quality, Kotaku should know it has an ethical responsibility, as their part-time role as news aggregator, to make sure they get the summary right and tight—failure to do so demonstrates poor professional courtesy to the writers of the source material, and is misleading to its readers.
Kotaku appears to be undergoing some change in its editorial mission, and the content and ambition behind the virtual magazine, K (now on issue 3), has been seeing more in-depth features with interesting ideas, genuine curiosity, and shoe leather reportage. Brian Crecente deserves the respect for building a successful and influential website from scratch; and leading and managing an aggregation website can be a thankless job. But can you be a jumbled news aggregator and still pine for a place as a respectable journal? A great aggregator should only guide, refer, and expose—it has no business creating original content. Once the aggregator mixes the pot, there is a danger that readers will cease to perceive the difference between the created and aggregated content, and effectively blur the line between “referral” and “misappropriation.” However, and unfortunately, Kotaku has to continue with its quick-shot salvos of zero-content posts, as a necessity to maintain their revenue, and to support their substantive content.
This only emphasizes the reality that the gaming community needs a site that exclusively focuses on good, comprehensive news and criticism aggregation. The number of blogs with high-grade editorial content is staggering. Not everyone has the time and luxury to find the countless blogs full of fascinating and thoughtful posts. With a comprehensive and thorough website aggregator writers will no longer have to concentrate on website metrics, advertising dollars or low readership numbers . Writers will finally be free to write; and each one will raise the editorial bar, one post at a time.
