Ask a gaming journalist what they are and I doubt they would say "journalist", because, let's face it, they're not. They're enthusiast press and little better than the forum posters you find on many websites. In fact, I find some forum posters much better at presenting actual information than many gaming websites.

Kowenicki raises a good point too. The target audience is too immature to warrant professional journalism, but at the sametime, until more professional websites/magazines present themselves, the audience will remain somewhat ignorant and immature.

Also, the internet hasn't helped much. Too many "gamers" with all their prejudices and opinions form websites, flogging their baseless ideas as facts. Not that their aren't positives of this, but their's no quality control anymore.

I'll agree on the point of the hive mind. It seems like every game journalist is playing the same thing at the same time (and that usually seems to slant towards the HD Multiplat flavor-of-the-month), which really distorts diversity. When was the last time you heard of a journalist who wasn't the dedicated Sony guy playing a PSP game, for instance, or anyone off dedicated Nintendo sites giving 3rd party Wii *or* DS games the time of day?

every month I always find a new reason to hate gaming journalism.

The worst offender IMO was GT with their IW podcast following Gamescon in 2009.  They said something along the lines of 'this time next year, the Wii will be not only irrelevant, but basically dead', the rest of the podcast turned into a Nintendo hating frenzy.

Apprently youve never read the comments on CNN or Yahoo or Fox News' website.

"real" journalists involved in politics or "news" are catering to a much more delusional, immature and scary audience.

Extremely good read. I agree with everything stated. Especialy the double standard portion.

You'd be surprised. Sites like Giant Bomb admit to being enthusiast press, but then you have the writers on sites like 1UP, IGN and Eurogamer that refer to themselves as journalist. They are though, most of them study in the correct fields, some of them have written for other magazines, newspapers and the games industry for years. Most of them aren't bad writers, it's just that they don't seem to take the job too seriously. As Koweniki said, the audience is immature and so the writers respond to that behaviour with lower quality work, mainly because they can get away with it.

Bingo. The only difference between this and gaming journalism is that in this case, the scary audience doesn't ascend to become the journalists, which is the case with gamers and journalism. As Scoobes said, gaming journalists are just forum-dwellers that get paid to do what we do every day: review games and report the news, and they honestly do precious more than we forum-dwellers do outside of in-person interviews and the ability to attend E3, because most of their "news" is just regurgitated press releases and the occasional GAF leak otherwise, and the game industry coddles them with review copies of games so that they can post reviews quicker than the end consumer, but that's all

If you don't like it, then you have to do your part to make them change.  Stop going to their websites, stop reading their reviews, stop reading their news, stop supporting them.

Other than gamefaqs and gamerankings, this is the only video game website I visit.  The rest suck, so I don't give them clicks.

Watch Classic Game Room HD on YouTube. Problem solved.

He is so good. I check his page every day for new videos.

I think I'll leave this here just in case anyone's interested.

http://www.youtube.com/user/InecomCompany?feature=chclk