https://www.gamesindustry.biz/amp/2020-04-20-kotakus-jason-schreier-joins-bloomberg-news
Honestly, good on him. G/O Media sucks shit and Spanfeller was and still is a herb.
EDIT: His last piece for Kotaku was a follow up on his massive 2018 piece on Rockstar’s corporate culture. And it’s hopeful? This is maybe possibly good on Rockstar???
The actual Mike Bloomberg doesn’t have much to do with the day-to-day of his news outlet, does he? Or if he does, I imagine he really only cares about the op-ed pages. Right?
I just hope that Jason can keep doing the reporting that he’s been doing so well for all these years. He’s a damn fine journalist.
His desk is probably 3 down from Jason’s
Imagine spending $20.6 million dollars to acquire a bunch of news outlets and manage to employ such terrible managers and CEO that you run them all into the ground in a year.
love to report on labour problems from the website owned by the guy who used prison labor during his obscenely expensive and short presidential campaign
among like a huge history of gross labor violations obviously (especially towards women, shocker) but thats the most recent one
Imagine how bad Jim Spanfeller must be for Mike Bloomberg to be an improvement.
I just saw some post on Twitter about Bloomberg news and layoffs? anyone know what I’m talking about? I can’t find the post because Twitter is bad
Re: Bloomberg News’ own issues, I definitely have concerns but - sorry to paraphrase an old ‘meme’ - there is no ethical media organisation under capitalism. There aren’t many places with the resources he needs for this kind of journalism that don’t have, to put it lightly, baggage.
I mean, we’re discussing this on a subdomain of Vice Media.
I’m reminded of the time Patrick was talking about how he accepted the job at Vice by basically saying there aren’t a lot of opportunities for people to move up in games journalism.
So if you get an opportunity go somewhere for more pay and to possibly start something new, you take it.
Like ricotta said, there really is no option that is free from sin. As long as he keeps doing the same amount of good.
Speaking from inside the game industry, I’ve seen a change in attitudes since Schreier’s article’s have started to get more attention. People are less willing to use the word crunch, overtime has been greatly curtailed and people in positions of power have admitted it’s a problem.
Granted, this is may be a decade too late and there are probably thousands of devs that exited the industry never to return, which is a significant loss of skill and knowledge. I’d say “better late than never” but I still carry some scars that I wont ever forgive some people for.
I’m less concerned about the fate of Jason’s eternal soul than I am about whether he’ll be able to do his style of journalism free of interference.
I share the concern, but I think the general attitude of most of these publications is ‘we’re exposing the seedy Truth (except at our affiliated organisations)’. It’s grimy and shite, but unless Bloomberg decides to buy shares in EA, it will probably not have too much of an impact.
I think my biggest concern would be how tightly the editor at Bloomberg controls things like ‘being pro-union’, as often discussions of crunch lead to discussions with labour organisers.
I was just thinking about how great it would be to have a staff of sportswriters who excelled at doing humor and culture pieces now that there are not sports.
While nothing in this thread is against the rules, we wanted to remind folks to make sure we are all following Rule 10 going forward: “Do not speculate on hires or personal lives of staff or personalities of this or any other site.”
A somewhat related tweet thread from Gita:
Anyone interested in Deadspin (and not the current Herb-backed zombie version) might enjoy the temporary blog they’ve set up for the week with many former Deadspin authors: https://unnamedtemporarysportsblog.com/
Anyways Deadspin forever, and good luck to Jason at his new job. I wonder if he might see it as a way for his reports about crunch to be taken more seriously by company bigwigs. I like Kotaku a lot, but I bet more executives read Bloomberg than Kotaku.
Thanks for sharing this! As someone who uses twitter sparsely (that site? It’s a bad one a lot of the time!), i wasn’t sure how to follow the Deadspin writers. Thanks!
Twitter is def bad. Sadly that blog is only live this week, it’s really hard to keep track of everyone w/o Twitter. I don’t actually have an account, but they have a profile where they post stuff from all the old staff - https://mobile.twitter.com/UnDeadspin
This is actually the second time they’ve done thus blog. They also did it over Super Bowl Weekend.
