Press Pass: Blogging by the Numbers

Game blogs get derided for shoddy, unoriginal journalism all the time. Is it fair? Press Pass investigates.

@CygnusBlue:

"HAY THERES SOMEONE WHO DID SOMETHING SIMILAR ONE TIME --- UR A CHEAT"

The article you linked to pales in comparison to Kyle's in-depth analysis here. The author even admits that his "basic maths skills are kinda crappy," so I would even take his data with a grain of salt. The post is in fact much more of a whine-fest than an in-depth analysis of online game journalism.

As with almost any study, there have been similar studies like it conducted in the past. Which doesn't mean a new study, especially that which expands research (which Kyle's article clearly does in every dimension), is just a blatant copy or unimportant or even unoriginal.

And having different perspectives on the same topic is integral to seeing the big picture. Your comment's negative, insulting nature is harmful to the discussion. A better way to approach this would have been, "Something similar to this has been done, why don't you check it out?" As in, "I would like to ADD to this discussion, not attempt to shut it down or take anything away from it."

@CygnusBlue:

Wow.

This may come off as hard to believe, but I had no idea knowledge of this NegativeGamer piece before right now. Honest. Just hadn't seen it. If I had, I doubt I'd have even bothered with my piece. You did a great job crunching this kind of data before me, and did some excellent analysis.

That said, I do consider myself an actual journalist. Even if I had seen the Negative Gamer piece before today, that doesn't give them an exclusive patent on the idea of analyzing blog content. It took an _exceptional_ amount of work to do my own number crunching of a whole week's worth of data (different data than NegativeGamer used, BTW) and do my own analysis of said data.

Calling this piece simple theft and implying that I'm "not a journalist" because someone else did a _similar_ (not identical) article recently just doesn't make sense to me.

Insinuating that this article is somehow theft because of its similarities to another article is like saying that ESPN.com "stole" the idea of writing about Kevin Garnett's absence from the NBA playoffs from SportsIllustrated.com.

Related or similar subjects != theft.

"In fact, it lines up nicely with a 2008 study that found 80 percent of quality UK newspaper content came from newswire or PR sources."

The actual quote from the link you posted is, "Some 80 per cent of news stories in the quality UK national newspapers are at least partly made up of recycled newswire or PR copy, according to new research." By skipping the "at least partly made up" qualifier you distort your source to strengthen your argument. In addition, the study *included* the "quality" UK national newspapers. The recycled material in this subset of papers was less (52-69%). The details of this study are better explained here: http://is.gd/xF7Q.

You do not detail how you determined originality making judgment of your comparison impossible. The standard for originality in the study you cite is that stories are not "wholly or mainly or partly based on information from pr departments or wire stories." This is a high bar for originality, please tell us how you determined the originality of a blog post. Do you still have access to all the PR copy and wire stories?

You are correct stating, "To say that these bloggers only take content from other sources is obviously unfair." But the comparison to the Cardiff study weakens you case for taking blog journalists seriously due to the numerous avoidable errors I've mentioned.

I'm just posting to tell cygnusblue: fuck off.

I invoke rule 24 of the internet!
yeah maybe it's been done before, but Orland made an effort to bring some new insight to the table, what have you done lately cygnus? trolls do not = expert journalism critic.