Looking for More News Staff

[DKII]

Hey all, I'm basically heading up the news team here right now.  Got a few people doing stuff but we're looking for more.  So far we've been doing some notable press releases (mostly myself) and analysis of our own sales numbers (mostly TheSource).  I'd like to expand a bit, and have started a few small interviews and the like.  It's also a slow news time heading into E3.  Anyway, what I'm looking for is people who:

- Have good writing skills

- Can write objectively (you don't have to be unbiased, you just have to be able to not *write* biased)

- Is interested in volunteering a few hours a week to write up a few articles a week

Interested folks should shoot an email over to [e-mail] where myself and/or ioi will take a look and get back to you.  Include how you meet the above points and why you're interested, etc. etc.  Also include your geographic location - we're especially interested in people near LA, SF, NY, Tokyo, and other major cities inside and outside the US. 

We're looking to do some interesting stuff in the near future, and ideally I'd like to see the news coverage expand to contain:

- Press releases; obvious really, usually only semi-important stuff like announced games or features, not as nice as exclusive stories but important to include to cover the bases; we do a lot of this already

- Game-specific interviews, probably close to release or just afterward for the most part tho can try to get some freshly-announced ones; starting some of this now

- Sales-specific interviews, ie: go talk to an analyst who makes a sales prediction and try to get a breakdown of the numbers or some more detailed reasons for the prediction

- Hands/eyes-on previews; short of commenting in released screenshots I don't see much progress in this area soon as we don't have access to media events and the like yet, though it is coming
- Site game reviews; could do this with high-profile titles at least at release if we get a sizable staff on it, would be good press if we got linked to GameRankings or MetaCritic.  Again we'd need a lot niore volunteers to do this and it wouldn't be any good if it was only a handful of titles.

- Sales analysis of our own, something like what TheSource is doing but more of it, with more Japan/worldwide numbers.  Seen some stuff posted on the forums that would've made a good front page article.
- Any other "feature articles" we come up with that doesn't really fit into the above categories, like staff picks of top 10 games for each platform or for the first quarter or what have you.

Since we are a sales website I'd expect a lot more sales-oriented items than normal but we won't be shoe-horning it into everything where it isn't appropriate.  Anyway if you're at all interested in helping out with this site and digging a little deeper into the gaming industry then you might normally see day to day then shoot me an email!

- Keith Jackson, aka DKII, Senior News Editor