Usual disclaimer, Grefter loves him some Gonzo writing, I tend to champion it well past the point where it is actually a good thing. Due to its very nature your mileage will drastically vary.
One thing I would note that makes more sense of Quinn's article is that it is a Gonzo piece, there is a reason she links to Gonzo Journalism in this part here.
Sometimes I still write one-off articles about these things for places like GiantBomb, Gamasutra, and Kotaku, because I think there’s value in having a wide variety of backgrounds writing on our medium and industry — a developer will have a different perspective than an academic who will have a different perspective from the critic, hardcore enthusiast, journalist, gonzo writer, and so on and so forth. This is great because each perspective brings a new way of thinking and talking about games to the table.
Which of course is set up later with the (valid IMO) claim that most gonzo writers aren't actually journalists, they don't have the same standards to be held up to (ie this isn't their day job, they should try, they likely don't have the same peer review circle). Which reads like making your own get out of jail free card for your article which is a bit problematic.
So ignoring the arguments though, do you necessarilly disagree with some of the points Ash? Like to be super stupid and anecdotal here. This site itself has had us as a community flirt with reviews and the like, we have always been aligned to games media as a thing. Out of the lot of us there is what, 4 of us that went pro in anything in the industry (You, Andy, Met and Laggy?) out of the four only yourself has anything to do with the media side of the industry directly.
I think the point there is more that there is a hedge industry of enthusiast journalism that isn't professional, has no desire to be so and shouldn't really be expected to. Like can you imagine how fucking frustrating it would have been for someone trying to go pro doing articles with us for the front page? We would be infuriating to work with because we are just in it for giggles (to which we would obviously have been pushing them to be trying elsewhere as well...), actually driving to go pro is fucking hard, especially if you don't want to start up your own little niche.
The broad strokes for the enthusiast market is 100% done to mock up the more "sinister" Techraptor segment even more. The belittling the enthusiasts for trying to get their mack on with their ill gained press pass is a humanising technique. They are losers, they are the underdog etcetc. And yes it does place "The Industry" on a plateau as well in the same stroke. Compare that to these guys that aggressively seek to go in for a profit! The evils!
It is 100% an appeal to emotion to highlight hipocrisy amongst some of the big "news" sources that are coming out of this stuff. She hyperfocuses on one example, but it is spreading beyond just Techraptor.
For example
http://imgur.com/RhZcUn6 Here you can see an annoucement from The Ralph Retort announcing they are having an interview with RooshV for his paid for sponsored slot. So all well and good right, they have transparency in their advertising that looks like regular content? Only really if you don't understand the issues with Native Advertising.
It gets worse though, it isn't just straight up accepting pay for access to an audience, but who they are accepting it from. I needed to look up RooshV. It quickly turns dark. This is what it is about
http://www.rooshv.com/i-started-a-new-web-site-reaxxion-com I’m starting a video game site even though I haven’t played video games seriously since the year 2000 (Starcraft was my jam). I don’t even play mobile games. I won’t blow smoke up your ass by pretending I’m a gamer or have a deep commitment in furthering game technology. My only commitment is with helping men.
I aim to protect the interests of heterosexual Western males, a category I’m in. The far-left is trying to censor and criminalize masculine behaviors that are normal. They want to relabel consensual sex as “rape” and relabel innocent flirting as “harassment,” and as I learned with #gamergate, they’ve successfully infected the gaming industry and gaming journalist sites by damaging the very nature of gaming development to fit their extreme political agenda. So while I don’t play video games, the idea of starting a pro-#gamergate site is compatible with my overall mission.
Which speaks for itself really plainly right there. Straight up paid for backing by an MRA but it is okay because they are open that he has paid for it, and it is totally relevant because he is opening a game news site so we thought you would like to know. It is just a chance for our advertisers to get together with a target audience that we think they could be really keen on.
So when she is calling all this stuff out, I do think it brings up a pretty important topic of, if you are going to campaign for Ethics in games Journalism, you probably want to run a pretty tight ship on that front and there is definitely some sites that associate themselves to the movement that do some hella skeevy things.
As an aside, I think one of the biggest harms to the Gonzo style ultimately is that it gets labelled Gonzo Journalism. Sadly most of us aren't Hunter Thompson and most definitely don't deserve to be even remotely closely associated with Journalism. I am not sure if that means Gonzo really shouldn't be a style outside journalists? But it is so appealling and fun to do, I don't know if I could comfortably editorialise (poorly) in another style.
Sort of edit (CK posted while I was writing so not real edit but don't want to work into structure of ramble) - CK, have you ever known a piece like that to be a light touch? You appeal to anecdotes and personal experience for effect.
