Quote Originally Posted by Ed Oscuro
Nowhere did we bring up qualifications of a good journalist, and that's not what people are focusing on here. But if you must...
Knowledge is a qualification of a good journalist; and I think we focused on that because posters talked about knowledge gaps of people with media badges, and the original post dealt with a terrible mistake on G4's site written by a journalist.

Who still watches Murnau's works? Who still plays Pong? Movies are important to our culture, so are early games. But you don't have to know much about either to contribute to their respective industries.
A director doesn't have to know Murnau. But if a movie reviewer doesn't know the man, then he isn't worth a cent!

A game designer doesn't have to know Pong; but if a professional game reviewer doesn't know it, then he isn't worth the quarter he spent in an arcade.

To create something and to interpret/analyzing it are two very different things. For creators sometimes history can be a burden, more often it is an advantage; the professional observers have to know history because the present is the result of the past, and to solve current problems or analyzing them is impossible without knowing recent history.

Let's take a somewhat backwards example - games for "nongamer" audiences; gamers who never had contemplated getting a game console, but now have some time to fiddle around with FreeCell and Spider Solitare, and then have moved onto other things. AOL and the MSN Games thing. It's precisely because some groups of people aren't held down by common conceptions of video games - and that they see things according to their own peculiar set of filters - that makes their observations valuable. The same is true of the blunderers at G4 - for all their mishaps, they have been picked for reasons other than mass market appeal.
Honestly, I don't get this argument. (This is not rhetorical criticism or cheap discussion strategy)

The gaps that currently exist between generations that have grown up with games and those that haven't will disappear with time.
You seem to assume that I favor one generation of game critics over another, or like to have age bias. Nope, I critisize the age bias. I want a good mix of young and old.

There are things an experienced game journalist cannot bring to the table; and there are things experienced game journalist are lightyears ahead of their younger colleagues.

What bothers me is the incredible and dumb youth bias for game journalists which treats experience as a burden and not what it actually is -- being way smarter than you were twenty years ago.

I don't see what this has to do with different generations of gamers. They always existed, and they always will; and I'm not demanding that the actual experience of a game era is necessary to be a good journalist; when someone writes today about WW I or the Glorious Revolution, they certainly didn't experience it and still can write very intelligent things about it.

Now, I can look at the front of any regional newspaper and find some sports columnist writing about the latest happenings, and commenting on the history of the event. Surprisingly often these comments are shallow and don't water like they should. Then I could flip open a copy of Sports Illustrated and find competent reporting and historical analysis.
There are times for mere reporting, and there are times for in-depth analysis. I'm not saying that game mags should consist of in-depth, intellectual, or even academic analysis.

But you would be certainly disturbed if you read on ESPN a preview about a segment of the history of Baseball, and they would talk about the Tennessee Red Sox.

For every Chris Morris and IGN out there, you're going to find...lots of loons. This isn't anything new.
Certainly true, but we still can evaluate the overall quality of game journalism which doesn't come even close to other areas. It has to develop, I think we agree on that. Some reviewers committ basic sins of reviews that my head starts to spin.

A good example are reviews about compilation discs of older games, or the unique new Mega Man games which are actually old. So much nonsense is produced there which shows a severe lack of knowledge about game history.

Allen Allencord is only the tip of the iceberg. Every good reviewer needs a lot of general knowledge about very different areas, plus expertise in its own area, and history is one of them. As a rule, todays younger game jourrnalist show a lack thereof, and the older game journalist who have this knowledge and analytical abilities are not given enough opportunities to increase the quality of game journalism.