VGChartz had an interesting article about what's wrong with games journalism and
I personally recommend reading it."Jim Sterling, review editor at Destructoid, says that calling game journalism a form of journalism at all is usually incorrect.
“I think calling it ‘journalism’ is wrong most of the time,” Sterling said. “Publishers have way too much power over outlets, the review scoring system is mired in backwards thinking that says anything below a 7/10 is unacceptable, and we have some websites writing purely for Google Trends and not for their readers.”
For those of you wanting to skip the full article, here's the gist of it:
-Too much editorial control from big name publishers;
-A huge tendecy to editorialize in news item, making them seem like opinion pieces rather than legit news articles;
-A tendency to publish content that's not entirely related to games, such as Japanese culture items;
-A consistent trend to make misleading headlines to generate hits;
-On the same page, the use of swear words to also generate hits, that also do not give the best impression to people outside the gaming world;
-Too much focus on coverage related to the big studios;
As far as I could tell, Kotaku seems to be the biggest offender from their research and everything wrong with them can be simply summed up
in this particular article.
Again, very little focus on the actual game other than giving an opinion on it, in which the casual consumer will take it as fact and steer away from it.
This is the complete opposite of what's happening in the film industry.