Tag: news

Thoughts On Gaming Journalism, Lasting First Impressions, and Ars Technica on Borderlands 2/”Shoddy Journalism”

I’m not too surprised by Ben Kuchera’s story, “Developer calls accurate Borderlands 2 report “shoddy journalism,”on Ars Technica that there is what I would call a video game developer-publicity-journalism complex. It seems that some developers and their hired marketing guns get pissy when gaming journalists actually do journalism including outing a game before it is “officially” announced. The funny thing about this problem is that so-called gaming journalists who sign NDAs with developers also get pissy when other non-NDA confined journalists beat them to an announcement. I can understand in the heyday of gaming magazines that this kind of collusion between developers, marketing gurus, and journalists promoted everyone’s interests: it sold games, it sold magazines, it kept the marketing departments or marketing agencies flush with cash, and the “story” about the game was firmly controlled. Now, however, the Internet and its new journalism is breaking down these firmly entrenched paths of information flow. The news is jumping the carefully laid tracks. This is good for news readers/gamers, but it is chaos for those who desire to control the flow of gaming news. I imagine the same is/will be true for other media creators. Bad or uninformed news early-on can sink or hurt new releases. This is probably akin to orchestrated fog of war news releases, but inverted–undesirable news released first leaves a lasting first impression.

I Hit the New York Times Paywall for the First Time Today, Easy to Bypass

I occasionally look to the New York Times for my daily fix of news, but today was the first time since they installed a paywall that I ran up against it (see above).

Luckily, there are ways to circumvent this. According to mashable.com readers:

While testing out the paywall Monday afternoon, Mashable readers Dmitry Beniaminov and Yuri Victor pointed out that it’s breathtakingly easy to subvert the paywall. Readers need only remove “?gwh=numbers” from the URL. They can also clear their browser caches, or switch browsers as soon as they see the subscription prompt. All three of these simple fixes will let them continue reading.

via Mashable.com here

I used the option to manually delete “?gwh=xxxxx” to continue reading on the Times today. A Safari extension that performs this function would be useful.

After a quick Google search, there is another way to bypass the paywall by hitting the “Reader” button in the URL field if you are using Safari 5 [from 9to5mac here]. This will bring up the page behind the paywall notice so that you can read it.

If anyone knows of a Safari extension that addresses this issue, please leave a comment on this post. Thanks!