Out of all the news outlets that I consider the big network news outlets (i.e. CNN, Fox, ABC, CBS), MSNBC's gaming section is one that stands out. For starters, I can actually find the gaming section easily, as opposed to searching and searching on sites like ABC and CNN. It has a very simplistic presentation of information, which is both good (you can see all the recent stories at a glance) and bad (all stories are lumped together and uncategorized). Like CBS's Gamecore, MSNBC updates a few times a week with original material, but also pulls a few stories from the wires. But before I dive into anymore comparisons, I would like to introduce Kristin Kalning, the games editor of MSNBC.com, who gave me a more behind-the-scenes look at MSNBC's game section.
Kristin has been an MSNBC editor for two years. She has been writing professionally on and off for about 15 years, being an editor at weekly magazine MacWeek, then an editor for Ziff-Davis, AOL, the Washington Post, a book publishing company and then coming to MSNBC. Also at MSNBC, she has a weekly column called On the Level.
What I learned:
- What factors go into choosing games stories at MSNBC. In addition to what’s listed in the interview below, Kristin also gave examples of basic online news judgment. For example, she saw an interesting story came across the wires at 6pm PST, but knowing it was 9 p.m. EST, she held off on posting it and decided to wait until next morning, when there were “more eyeballs.” This seems like a really simple idea, but with the Internet being the “24-hour news desk” of immediacy, I hadn’t considered holding on to a story as an option.
- Readers don’t really visit MSNBC’s game section for game reviews. I never really considered that before, but it makes sense because if you’re a gamer you probably already have your enthusiast publication(s) of choice that you go to for this.
- Kristin thinks one of the main differences between main-stream media games reporting and enthusiast games reporting is the MSM has a more trained, professional journalism.
- Kristin has a strict “no-swag” policy. She says most game developers are wary to speak with MSNBC because they don’t have control over coverage (although this is an issue in other businesses, too).
- Always, always, ALWAYS make sure you double-check to see if it’s OK to post a full transcript. I transcribed the whole 20-minute interview only to have a member of the MSBNC PR staff to tell me that they don’t allow full transcriptions of interviews being posted. Boo.
Interview
Kristin: I became interested in games because I married a guy who works in the industry and he would come home and tell me about his job, and I thought it was really fascinating. And the more of his friends that I met, the more I realized these guys were from very diverse backgrounds. A lot of them had gone to architecture school, had gone to art school, some of them like my husband had been science majors. They come from really diverse backgrounds and they were really passionate about what they did. They really seemed to love what they did and work really hard.How did you become games editor at MSNBC?
So, I just started kind of thinking that their stories were fascinating and when I was at the book publisher—because it was a technical book company—I got them to do a couple of books on how you do level design and so forth. But I got really into it, so when I interviewed here to be editor in the technology and science section, the games stuff was part of that section and my boss just thought wow that would just be great if there was somebody who knows about games, who could kind of resurrect our coverage. I guess it was kind of a bonus that I’m female because there may be other women covering games in the mainstream press, like I think there’s a woman at the BBC, but there’s not very many of us, so I think he thought that would be kind of cool and novel and so, that’s the story.
Kristin: Is that in terms of coverage or what we write about? Because we take a lot of stuff off the wires. We, like most news sites out there, like Yahoo or whatever, we’re an aggregator and we take stuff off of the AP wire and the Reuters wire. Also, we’re half-owned by NBC, so we have access to a lot of their news-reporting and stuff.How do you decide what game-related stories news-worthy enough to take to the more mainstream audience?
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In terms of coverage that I would assign or cover myself, we’re moving away from doing game reviews because I’m finding that I don’t know that gamers necessarily are coming to us for game reviews.
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So, we’re scaling back on our reviews or we’re doing Mario Kart, and we did Grand Theft Auto, of course. But I’m still trying to figure out what people are coming to us for and based on what I see in the feedback that I get from the people who write to me directly, um, I’m getting a lot of younger gamers, but I’m also getting a lot of people who grew up playing videogames like me and who have kids or they have jobs and they miss gaming and they like to game and they wish that they could game more. They’re kind of torn or they want to game but they have kids and family and all that stuff and so a lot of those themes are the ones that I’m focused on.
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We’re trying to stay away from, like, every week a study comes out that says that games make you violent or whatever, so I try to stay away from those unless there’s something very substantive and there’s a really large sample size. Little interesting things, like I just got a press release about a conference taking place in I believe it’s Washington DC next week called Games for Health. there are games that are being specifically designed to get kids interested in eating healthy, there’s games that teach inner-city kids how to avoid getting sexual-transmitted diseases. And so I think that’s interesting. I think that those sorts of things are really interesting. Now, I don’t know if the hardcore gamer is going to read that, but I know that my mom would and so, you know, our audience, it really runs the gamut. I get grandmothers reading my stories, I get kids reading my stories, so our coverage of videogames usually appeals to one audience or the other, so I have to write the column that appeals to both.
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So, anything interesting, anything kind of off the beaten path, like I’m not interested in… it seems like a lot of the blog sites, most of which I read myself and some of the guys that I know, they’re just throwing out press releases and they’re not bothering to source and they’re not bothering to do any additional reporting and that’s not at all what we do. You know, if we’re going to write a story—we’re journalists and so if I write a story myself I’m going to do research and reporting and verify and fact-check and what-not, so that, is the difference I guess. And also, a lot of my readers could care less about a lot of the incremental stuff that gets covered on the blogs. So, in terms of what we cover, that’s how we determine it, and that’s how I determine it.
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I try to have something original for the section at least three times a week, like meaning my column and then we do Talkback Games and then maybe a review or an original piece at least three times a week. There aren’t a lot of people out there that write about games or that know games really well that are trained journalists. I’ve tried and, you know, it’s difficult.
Kristin: Oh, um, well if you’re talking about the enthusiast press the differences in how they cover it and we cover it—let’s see, how do I put this—um, we’re trained writers. We’re trained journalists, and the stuff that we write goes through rigorous editing. Just the kind of questions that are asked—I’ve read a lot of Q&As and it’s pretty obvious that the people—I mean, they’re enthusiasts, right—they’re enthusiasts, it’s obvious that they’re fans of the game, fans of the person they’re talking to and so they’re not necessarily going to ask uncomfortable questions. And just that you’re seeing that IGN gave Grand Theft Auto 4 like a 10 out of 10, well, they got that game really early and they’re all fans of it. Whereas, here, we got the game the weekend before and we didn't have to play it in front of anybody from Rockstar or Take Two. We played on our own terms. I’ve heard that PR people will call the enthusiast press and threaten them, and that would just never, ever in a million years happen.Of course, game enthusiast publications (EGM, Game Informer, Gamespot, IGN) will be more oriented toward a more hardcore audience, but do you notice any distinct differences in game trade publications and how games are covered at mainstream outlets?
VJ: Wow.
Kristin: Oh never, we would never in a million years. And they know that. And so as a result a lot of the game developers are reluctant to talk to us. I mean, they will eventually, but even people from my husband’s company [Valve]—I mean, the PR guy, won’t—I couldn’t report on it anyway—but he won’t return calls from my free-lancers because they can’t control the coverage. They can’t control the coverage at all, and that makes them uncomfortable. So, and that’s actually a lot of businesses, not just games.
I think the game industry is very leery of talking to the mainstream press because unfortunately the coverage up to this point has been kind of drive-by coverage. It’s like there’s a shooting, Jack Thompson blames videogames and the press picks up on it. But, you know, it’s evolving. I mean, mainstream coverage is evolving because there’s more people like me who actually play and that write about games and have a journalism background. And so it’s changing, but I think that the games industry is, like I said, very leery about allowing sort of the mainstream press into their club. Not that we’d want to be in it anyway.
But also, we don’t accept any swag. Like when we were reviewing Halo 3 my reviewer got like a duffle bag filled with easily like $500 worth of swag, and I made him send it back. And you know, that just doesn’t happen. I’ve been offered to—they’ve offered to fly me places. I had this one guy who wanted to write for me, and it turned out that he had been going on junkets that were paid for by Sony and I had to cut him loose because that’s just not something that we do. And, so that’s the difference. Whether it’s good, bad—you know, do the enthusiast press get better access? Possibly. But I don’t know if their coverage is better. From my opinion, it’s not. It’s not better. It doesn’t serve the reader. So that is, in my opinion, the big difference.
VJ: Yeah, I’ve heard those kinds of stories before where the enthusiast press has to pretty much sell their soul to get access to these games, and I’m kind of hoping that’s something that is going to change.
Kristin: I think so. I think that once the game developers see… well, once they grow up—I mean, there’s so much consolidation, and a company like EA will talk to me. They’re a big company and they know that “press is press.” And it’s their experience that you can’t always control the message, and I think as these companies start to mature they’re going to understand that. But, you can try to control the message, but “coverage is coverage” and it’s not that big of a deal.
Kristin: I mean a lot of what I’m writing about has a business element. I mean, obviously the fact that games—I wrote a story recently about whether the games industry was recession-proof. And so that has a strong business aspect. The fact that the industry is growing as much as it is, and the fact that the Wii has sold as much as it has, and sort of the battle between the consoles has a strong business-consumer aspect to it. And that typically is owned by our business department, but they let me you know state that’s my area. So, there’s a little bit of a cross-over there. I don’t think you could have—the fact that it has grown in importance and why people pay more attention to it and why the mainstream press is paying more attention to it is because it’s become a big industry form a financial standpoint. So, I mean, the two sort of go hand-in-hand.Does MSNBC’s gaming section do a lot of business-related game stories? [Thinking back to what David Thomas had talked about with business reporting]
