Text Tree: A Week of Interviews on New Media v1.6

As if in an attempt to one-up Wesley Johnson’s “Text Tree” interview picture from yesterday in hilarious caption-ability, our featured writer today is a unicorn Griffin McElroy of AOL-owned Joystiq.com. His most recent achievement was taking the Playstation Network by storm with a meme of diabolical proportions (we can’t speak of it here without offending you, dearest reader) and he was kind enough to respond to our Twitter plea for game writers to answer a few questions on new forms of content delivery. Even if we don’t agree with his crazy/ludicrous feelings about Fable 2′s ending, we do find what he has to say about podcasting quite interesting. Hopefully you will too! And if you’re enjoying these interviews, please let us know! (Maybe enough comments will force a response out of N’Gai Croal — a boy can hope, can’t he?)

(GEEK): As an occasional host on the Joystiq Podcast and a seasoned writer on Joystiq.com, could you explain why you think podcasting is an important approach for journalistic coverage, and more specifically, games journalism?

I think this answer could best be given through the insight of my father, who has worked in radio his entire adult life. He’s seen the industry change over 30-some odd years, from a legitimate, popular source for music and news to a collection of sanitized, corporate entities in decline. He got a Zune for Christmas, his first digital media player, and I quickly introduced him to the world of podcasts. I realized how much our tech-savvy generation takes for granted — my father was bewildered at the prospect of free (to consume and produce) old-school radio roundtables regarding virtually any topic he could ever want to listen to two or three people prattle on about for an hour.

Podcasting is important because it’s opening up the audio broadcast medium to a wider audience than ever before — much like blogging opened up the printed word to the masses in a… Gutenbergian manner (Johannes, not Steve). The more people contribute to the landscape, the more widely accepted the medium becomes. I don’t think it’s too outrageous to claim that within a year, every sizable gaming blog will have a regularly updated podcast, just to stay competitive. The channels of reporting news on the internet are evolving rapidly, and outlets that fail to adapt to said changes will be eaten alive.

That all came off far too dour — I also believe that podcasting is fun. This could just be because my cohorts are genuinely hilarious dudes, but I can’t really think of a better way to spend an hour and a half than to chat about Witch-shooting in Left 4 Dead or the awful ending to Fable 2 with the guys I work with. Not only is it a blast, but it’s helped strengthen the Joystiq community. There’s a Facebook group some 2,100 members strong called the “Joystiq Podcast Appreciation Group” who, in addition to submitting frequently disturbing photoshops of our Podcasters, record their own podcast (the “Joystiq Podcast Appreciation Group Podcast”), which in turn has its own appreciation group. Their fervor is both humbling and terrifying.

(GEEK): In your time as a games journalist/games enthusiast, you’ve seen games writers laid off or resign for other ventures (be they game-related or otherwise). It could be said that the cutbacks we’ve seen budget-wise in games journalism are symptomatic of changing business models that are effecting journalism on the whole. In that regard, do you believe Joystiq or, maybe more importantly, all publishing entities in the games journalism industry are adequately adapting to changing business models?

As a vernal 21-year-old college student, my exposure to the producing side of gaming journalism is somewhat limited. I wasn’t around before the internet held sway — at least, I wasn’t around as a professional journalist. Of course I read EGM and Nintendo Power during my formative years. However, I’m a firm believer that people will always gravitate to the cheapest, fastest form of media made readily available to them. Excluding print fetishists (I admit I still like the feeling of glossy paper slipping ‘twixt my digits), a reasonable person wouldn’t pay money to wait a month to receive news they could read now, for free.

That said, I think the gaming journalism industry is far more resilient than other journalistic enterprises when it comes to keeping up with the times. Maybe it has something to do with our natural tech-savvyness — or maybe it has more to do with the fact that our fairly new niche has less of a reason to resist change than the older print publications across the U.S.; the same steeped-in-tradition publications whose failure to adapt is slowly, regrettably choking the life out of them.

(GEEK): What else do you believe we should be doing, as journalists, to pursue better coverage going forward? What should we be doing better?

What gaming journalists as a whole could be doing better is breaking out of the the echo chamber that constitutes our daily gaming news cycle. So many stories are generated from press releases that appear in our inboxes, or from topics discussed on other gaming sites — while its important that we do report the major stuff, we all need to do a better job of finding the small stories as well. This is something that print publications thrived on — and if that medium is truly going under, it’s something that we can’t afford to let go down with it.

Also, gaming journalists need to quit being ashamed of their love for the Pokemon series. I outed myself last year, and let me tell you, it feels great.