The current state of journalism

[EssoAir]

http://www.gamesreviews.com/news/07/wii-u-emulator-released/


Above is yet another example of the horrible standard for "journalism" in the world today. Its astounding to me that these morons can spend 5 minutes writing a catchy headline and 1 paragrph stating the obvious. Often they throw in a self-evident statment of opinion "this could be really bad for nintendo" (from the example above). Its not just one site, either. Almost every tech blog has lowered their standards. All they care about are the clicks. They want you to load the page and therefore the ads. They dont actually care if you like the article, or if it is completely factual, or even if it has proper grammar and spelling.


As a highschool student, in order to make a C (which is a really bad grade for those who dont know the American scale) I have to write minimum 10x better than the average article in today's Google News results.


What say you?

 

[Exophase]

That's what you get when you count anything any site posts as journalism. That's a totally open, unrestricted arena. The standard is horrible because there is no standard. You'd may as well lament the quality of youtube comments.

Strangely though, in your criticism you missed the main thing that was wrong with this article - they reported on an obvious hoax if not outright scam. They did at least clarify that with an update (rolls eyes)

 

[WizardStan]

This isn't the state of journalism, gamesreviews.com is hardly the height of cultured news. It's little more than a blog site for games. Some guy caught wind of something interesting and wanted to geek out about it. Real newspapers have fact checkers that would have caught this before going live.

That being said, all I can say is "duh". These "surveys" have been around for a while and they are always scams. Forget the technical difficulties of the emulator itself, the fact that the authors chose a file distribution channel which requires active intervention for their cash flow over the myriad free ones which are entirely ad driven should be the biggest tip off. The double fact that some of the "surveys" require you to enter your phone number so they can send you "free" messages (at only $2 per message, text "STOP" to stop receiving your daily joke) or download browser plugins should have cinched it: 100% pure grade A scam.

 

[WizardStan]

Heh, it occurs to me that using gamesreviews.com as an example of "The current state of journalism" is very similar to what the article itself is doing: catchy headline with incorrect or at least misleading information.

 

[DaMummy]

why even spread this garbage to other forums?