No Carmac, Esports Journalism Has Not Gone Backwards
A former award winning esports journalist turned executive Michal “Carmac” Blicharz has a very rose tinted view of the "glory" days of esports journalism and his role within it.
In the recent Esports Heaven Show myself, Rod “Slasher” Breslau and Duncan “Thorin” Shields talked about all the things that sucked about being an e-sports journalist. Had we had enough time I’m sure we would have got round to one of the many annoyances we ignored – namely that day, approximately every three months or so, where Michal “Carmac” Blicharz wakes up, remembers he used to be an e-sports journalist and decides to pour on some criticism about what poor jobs we all do, which is lapped up by his adoring fanbase.
Now, it shouldn’t be necessary to write this paragraph but this is e-sports, where the golden rule is never criticise anyone with more fans than yourself, so I’m going to add it. I like Michal. I respect his work – certainly more than he respects mine it seems. He has always been a great person to have discussion with and he has been a great host at IEM. I don’t begrudge him a single aspect of his continued success within e-sports… Hell, he’s good at what he does and he was a pioneer for e-sports journalism.
However, I am tired of his constant sniping at current e-sports journalists, the inference being that it was somehow done better back in his day and he indeed worked to a higher standard than we all do now. The reality is very different. The current crop of e-sports journalists operate to much higher standards, as you’d expect people coming after the first generation to do. Work is produced at a more prolific rate, more journalistic staples and skills have started to be adopted by what were little more than glorified bloggers at the start. The e-sports journalists I see produce work that the old SK Gaming and GotFrag circle jerk – bar a very few exceptions – never could and I find it repellant that in the interests of protecting a brand, history is so often distorted.
In his blog post he criticised the efforts of journalists covering the IdrA story he stated that the reporting on the incident lacked “context, perspective, intelligent analysis and commentary.” Apparently news sites are now redundant when it comes to “breaking news” because Twitter has taken over that role (even though my own site has broken big stories such as WCG going mobile only, or mTw fleecing its players and deciding to cease operations) so we shouldn’t try and keep up. He then made a post outlining a blueprint for what a Carmac approved piece of coverage would look like:
Every time a story like this breaks, the appetite anything that relates to it is enormous. Three basic facts don’t suffice. There’s so much more than could be added:
– Why is IdrA a big deal? What are his achievements, his highs and his lows? It would be good to list them in a small box or table in the article.
– The premature exit from the WCS match wasn’t the first of IdrA’s career. There were many and not everyone knows - what were they? How about a selection of YouTube clips from those games?
– The comment IdrA made on TeamLiquid wasn’t his first that warranted attention. What were the other famous comments on TL / reddit / Twitter? How many times has IdrA been banned / warned on TL before? (If you’re curious, the answer is: about 30 bans / warns in 6 years.)
– IdrA was almost synonymous with Team EG. How do his team mates feel about his exit?
– Why not ask a couple of them or quote their tweets or podcast statements?
– What’s next for IdrA? Is he a risky pickup for another team or a hot commodity? Why not interview a team manager about that angle?
– Why does IdrA quit games in the first place? Why not interview a couple of pro gamers and ask them? Why not ask a sports psychologist if you’re more ambitious?
While this may look good on the surface of things there are many factors it doesn’t take into consideration. We’re going to come to those in a minute. First I do want to make it clear that while this blog post does demonstrate that Carmac has a good working understanding of how the modern news process works now, he certainly didn’t when he was an active writer.
Saying it will make me about as popular as a pig in a mosque but Carmac’s own work hardly embodied any of the stuff he is talking about. If we were to take his 2008 E-sports Award winning article, “Paupers Will Be Kings”, as a barometer of what he contributed to e-sports journalism then I would be asking the same questions he is asking of us. I could copy and paste its lofty 482 word count into the body of this article and not make my own overlong. Where indeed was the context, perspective, intelligent analysis and commentary within that piece? And it’s not as if there weren’t other writers certainly coming a hell of a lot closer to those achievements as a list of all nominated e-sports journalists that year should be able to verify.
And if you think it’s wrong to take one – albeit award winning – piece and use it to judge a journalists career, you’d be right. By the same token it’s wrong to make unrealistic comparisons and I would urge anyone to cast their minds back and truly think about where any e-sports journalist came close to the standards set by the BBC or any major, international news corporation when it comes to rolling coverage. Before we can aspire to be at that standard we have to know where we are presently. That can’t happen when people with influence want to paint the fairly dismal past as bright and vibrant by talking about present shortcomings.
So before we get into the ins and outs as to whether or not he had a valid point, let’s look at who is raising those points and their motivations for doing so. I don’t believe Carmac is the man to champion journalistic standards. It would be like The Pope coming out complaining about how the education system fails to protect children from sex predators. Even if accurate, what has occurred in his own house would certainly leave a bad taste in the mouth, pun probably intended.
There it is, it’s out the way. I have no doubt there will be the usual furore at this point and few shall read on because you are never allowed to criticise the generation of elder gods, raised high and worshipped in the church of nostalgia. Yet they can, and do, regularly impart their no longer relevant wisdom to us and I know I’m not alone in feeling a little bit weary of hearing it.
For those of you who stick around, what I’ll now look at are the points in the blog themselves because, even though I have no doubt in my mind they were penned simply to serve as a reminder for the brilliance we lost when Carmac took that highly paid position within Turtle Entertainment, they are worth scrutinising all the same.
To validate his examples he links to a screenshot of BBC reporting on the Luis Suarez biting incident. I’ve done my fair share of sports reporting and I’ve been involved with TV shows such as Sports Tonight Live. I know what goes on behind the veneer that is presented to the public. Anyone thinking that all of that is achieved by one person, that one person being a highly skilled and diligent journalist, is being incredibly naive. At the moment Luis Suarez bit Branislav Invanovic the press can only report the facts. What comes after is a process involving several people.
The skilled sports reporter will remember he had a similar incident while playing for Ajax but, given that this is simply copy writing being put into a website, it’s just as likely the person doing it isn’t a veteran reporter and might have no working knowledge of football at all. Not to worry though because he will be presented with some bullet points courtesy of the researcher(s) that get assigned to digging up a disciplinary history of the player. When it comes to gathering quotes, there are teams of people who man phones, endlessly ringing anyone with a vague tie to the situation or pundits. These are then also presented to the copy writer for inclusion to “flesh out” the piece. At the very worst someone will have transcribed the quotes from post match interviews, which the BBC will have conducted themselves anyway. As the story unfolds these are routinely added to the same news post as and when they are ready, or a whole new post that says fundamentally the same thing, with a little bit more, is created. Those who remember the chronology of the Suarez story on the BBC will remember that it began as the opening paragraph in the match report, followed by a post stating what he had done and the likely consequences. That post evolved, thanks to the efforts of probably at least half a dozen people, to include punditry comment with a link to a sponsored column, an inset listing Suarez’s disciplinary history, some quotes from concerned footballing luminaries and then later added Suarez’s own statement apologising for what he did. The key things in all of this great reporting? Resources and access.
The resource element is something criminally overlooked in Carmac’s blog, probably because despite his numerous accolades he never had to think about it. Being able to throw multiple bodies at a story is, naturally, a huge benefit. If you want a fast response to a breaking story with so much detail, it would take a prodigious talent indeed to be able to deliver what he expects. If you’re trawling through years of e-sports history, you’re not writing. If you’re gathering multiple quotes to see which one best fits or is going to be the most incendiary, you’re nor writing. If you’re trying to find a specific angle on a story you don’t think anyone else will cover by dredging up the one obscure detail that will make your telling of the event unique, you’re not writing. And if you’re writing up the facts you’re not doing any of the above.
There is still an emphasis, erroneously in my opinion, on the importance of being first in e-sports. People are so fixated with traffic because it usually drives the finances of the business and they see the key to that as being first. If you get the first report of the story people will come to your site in the absence of any others reporting on it. However, the one part where Carmac is absolutely on the money is that unless you’re breaking the story ahead of people wanting it made public, you’ll never beat social media. Someone typing “OMG IdrA kicked from EG?!?!?!1111” doesn’t have to write at least 500 words and copy paste a statement, code it all nicely and hit “approve”. By the time you’ve done all that there’s a Reddit thread with 200 comments or more and the debate will be taking place there, not on your site.
Writing the best version of the story is the way to go but that takes time. In the absence of a team of researchers (we have less total staff at Cadred than the number that worked on that Suarez story, just one of the news items of the day at the BBC) it is usually the responsibility of one person to do it all. Is it any wonder then that sometimes it falls short – as I fully expect my own take on it did – as you desperately clamour to do the best work you can as quickly as you can.
Anyone who writes in e-sports now knows first hand that everything is a compromise between speed and quality. No writer gets to do their best work with the constant demands from the readership – you’re considered “slow” or news is considered “old” if you’re a few hours behind – and it is only the work that relates to non-current affairs that we get to take our time over and finish to our own standards. My own piece on IdrA came the day after the story broke and was considered late to the party. Some said it offered nothing new by the time the discussion had panned out. Maybe they are right. Regardless, we tried to provide something informative and entertaining for the readers and I slogged away at it for some time.
Equally lack of resources can impact on the quality of writing because e-sports journalists are expected to be little more than content machines. When I travel to an event it is typically in a team of two. I will have to write about 5000 words per day in match reports, breaking news, analysis, as well as being on camera for large chunks of that. When you are operating to deadlines that don’t shift and are operating on about five hours sleep a night, some of that copy is going to read like, for want of a better word, bollocks. Yet write it you must even though you know in your heart of hearts it’s not good enough, but you just can’t find the best way to write it, and the guy who knows the answer to that thing isn’t online and the next game is starting in five minutes so fuck it…
Compare that to the BBC who send one person to write a match report about one game taking place over the weekend, with the expectation that the match report will be published in full twenty minutes after the full time whistle blows. If the BBC were covering football e-sports style half the games would be played at once at 15:00, then the rest would come in 90 minute intervals with no breaks from 17:00 onwards with one guy producing match reports for them all. If you asked a full time sports reporter to operate in such a way he’d think you were insane, yet that’s what we all regularly do in our line of work. Hell, I think that’s a case to suggest we’re made of sterner stuff than regular reporters and probably serve our community a lot better for a lot less reward than they see.
Access is another issue. A criticism of Carmac’s was that no-one went out and got comments from EG players, managers and so on. Not every e-sports reporter is going to be able to do that. When a researcher from the BBC calls you and says “hey we wondered if you had any comment about the Luis Suarez incident”, it has a bit more impact than “Hi I write for a website that has less readership than the number of people registered to the fan page of your Peggle team, can I have a quote about how you feel about IdrA”.
Obviously the elite class of e-sports journalists have the contacts and the moxy to ask for quotes. Well, Geoff “iNcontroL” Robinson commented no-one approached him… I imagine most of us felt it was redundant given he found out on a streaming show and everyone who tuned in got to see his raw, uncut, emotional response to the news. If you speak to the management they will tell you what they always tell you – “we are releasing a statement” or “beyond the statement we have released we have nothing more to add”. That’s the reason the statements are there. They are thought out, balanced, where appropriate viewed by a legal team, safe and professional. Making off the cuff, off-script remarks to journalists is the first thing you are taught not to do in the PR 101 every personality goes through. Sadly that culture has come to e-sports as well.
As for the player himself, it was clear Greg was going to keep his cards close to his chest. Players want the perfect platform to put their side across given that their personality is as big a commodity, if not bigger, than their skills. Is a quote for a piece of news the best use of their time? Of course not… They’re lining up a video interview, or an appearance on a stream, in an environment where they know they will be heard and in a setting where they know they will maximise their potential audience.
I myself have criticised the man that actually got the interview we all wanted, JP McDaniel, many times in the past. I’ve said he was a soft touch in interviews. However, he asked the right questions and for 38 minutes showed exactly the sort of thing we want from e-sports coverage. It was well produced, it answered all the big questions and it got a few important things on record that slightly contradict other versions. It was also revelatory – we now know that we will no longer have IdrA the player to kick around but rather IdrA the commentator. It’d be patronising of me to say “I felt proud” or some other slush. JP did a good job and I was quick to point that out. It’s funny how the examples of good work never get lauded as much as they should, even in a climate where people are talking about collective failings. Any journalist worth their salt watching that interview will have felt a little envious that it wasn’t them getting it and that is the best testament to a job well done I can think of.
I feel most of the criticism Carmac came out with was proved wrong after the fact and not because we suddenly raised our game to appease our patron saint. Rather, for the reasons listed, to see the very best e-sports journalism has to offer you have to give it time and that was something that he didn’t afford anyone before wading in with the cheap shots about how we all fell short. I watched that interview with JP and I thought “that wouldn’t have happened five years ago” and I know, from long trudging experience, that I’m absolutely right because I was there and it never did. Hell, we were still getting to grips with video back then.
Whatever you say about the current generation of e-sports journalists, one thing can’t be denied. The first generation – and I cannot include myself among them – never had a group of indolent, retired colleagues constantly snipe at their efforts in a bid to stay relevant to that line of work. They had it easy by comparison. E-sports has got better and the big stories are treated in the way you’d expect. The ability of the journalists has grown in tandem with the size of e-sports. Good things lie ahead. We all know what we need to do, just give us the time and means to do it.