When gaming is your obsession and not a job, you'll naturally seek info on gaming all the time.
Meanwhile, when it becomes your job, you only want to have anything to do with it during work hours.

Who do you think would have more knowledge on the issue?

I just dont believe that anyone can be a gaming journalist. 

You and others ripping on Pachter really have no place commenting on him when you know little about him, most of his 'predictions' are very off the cuff and not serious. No he doesn't have a 'cushy job' a lot of what he does, you don't even see.

Stop reading the headlines, watch his show, and you'll see.

Journalists are just forum-goers who were lucky enough to ascend at some point or other. Some are good at heart, some are not, but all share the same common origin

I mean, hell, look here at VGC. Many of our own Writers are ascended posters

With any job the devil is in the details, or to put it another way it is easier said then done. There is a human tendency to assume that what we see up front constitutes the same in the back. This is actually a logical deduction that tends towards being correct. What you see is usually what you get. Were that not the case life would be truly terrifying. That said the rule almost never applies to employment. Every job is more complex then it looks, and you really need to develop a lot of skills to succeed. That is what people talk about when they say secrets to the trade.

On a purely literary level game journalists are paid to be short, concise, and balanced. They must lay out the high points, low points, features, and opinion. All within a short period of time under a deadline. Polish and length while not contrary to reviewing are not the crux of the challenge. They have a handful of minutes to giver to fully inform the reader or viewer. While still being entertaining. That is a difficult talent to come by naturally, and takes a good amount of time to perfect. I am a concise writer, and I can tell you it can take hours to keep it short, simple, and rewarding.

Their task is not to play games. They are paid to dissect games, and the faster they do it the better. You could say the difference is like the one that exists between making love and whoring. One is a pleasure, and the other is going through the motions. A good reviewer should be able to burn through a game. This actually takes a special mindset. You can develop it, but if it doesn't come naturally to you it is going to be incredibly tedious. They do not play the games linearly, or in a organic fashion. They stab the games to get the most information possible in the least amount of time.

Honestly I would say about three percent of posters would qualify on the writing level of the equation. That being decent writing, decent research, and good logic skills. The sad truth is the vast majority of posters on this site are lacking in basic journalistic skills. When they post a link nine times out of ten someone else has done the actual work. After that you would probably lose about half that number on the technical side. Sitting in a chair playing a utterly crappy game for four hours at a stretch just plain isn't fun. Cramped bodies, carpal tunnel, the lack of real meaningful social interaction. With that you need a mind that can entertain itself. Otherwise you likely to go just plain nuts after a couple months.

I am saying you would find a few here or in most gaming forums. More in one forum, and a few in the other. The thing is it probably isn't that great of a job. Sure it probably isn't back braking labor, or a high stress environment. It is just probably a lot of mind numbing boredom. That probably ruins most of the fun in gaming.

I'd say a good number of them ARE smarter, some do want to be legit journalists, the majority of these smart cookies are actually just playing off what gets the site hits and their articles viewed. So if calling Nintendo crap gets them hits it's done, if Move vs Kinect articles gets them hits, BAM they'll do it, basically they want to spin a web in a way that plays to their captive audience, in doing so I feel they've actually hurt gaming journalism, but when you see things like Fox News thriving you realize there's a problem with the whole damn system.

When you take a step back and see it, you realize why the forum battles happen, the posters are the puppets and they the puppeteers.

there is a big divide between competent and incompetent gaming journalists. The bottom half of the spectrum are equal to or worse than the majority of forum posters.

If someone bought me a game, paid me to beat it and give it an honest review, I think many of the more extreme forum posters could write a professional review.

Most reviews now see considerable bias, Companies should have 2 people collaborate on a review so that a broader perspective is tackled. E.g. I watched Gametrailers review of InFamous 2, and half of it they talked about how great the mission creator was. I honestly don't care for that, probably won't play it, and wouldn't give the game any extra points for including that, but others might.

I've seen IGN give Killzone 2 a 9.5/10, and Killzone 3 an 8.5 because the game wasn't too different, but playing these games I feel that Killzone 3 is significantly improved over Killzone 2.

Often times I see some games get significantly over-inflated or severly negatively rated reviews because it's the reviewers type of game (e.g. Ghost Recon 1 on Gametrailers is a 9.8/10 game)

Journalists are pretty childish and can be very unfair, I don't see anything special about their reviews except the fact that they record every moment of gameplay.

However to be fair, these guys have to beat a game within a very condensed time-frame, note every issue or good moment they had with a game, and write a moderately well written review about a game, often times before it's released in retail. It can be hard to be fair under strict conditions as many games really need to be enjoyed over time (like Halo, GT, and Mario Kart).

I can only really speak for reviewers here, but the difference on this site between a reviewer and a forum poster who can review well is that the forum poster hasn't applied to be a reviewer :/

And if you ever think a review that we or any other site has written is childish or poorly written, go read some user reviews and try to say that they're any better.

True sometimes you need to read beetween lines to get real score.

A lot of DA2 reviews had little tidbits to stay away from this crap before finishing with 9/10 score ;)