Following up: Building a Better Video Game News Service

Wall to wall coverage of a news event, social feed blowing up with hot takes and alternate views for a week or two and then… silence.

Ever wondered what happens to the people in the news after the news crews have moved onto the next story?

In the world of video games, the people who are in the news today are likely to be in the industry years from now. Unlike other types of “world events”, it’s unlikely anything everyone cares about today will be completely obsolete tomorrow.

Take a rumour on a new game console. Someone with some credibility might post the rumour, media outlets pick up the story and tell us what they think, and then silence on the topic until something more official is released. If the rumour was wrong or even slightly incorrect, the original story is revisited usually only to mock the original poster.

I submit it’s a journalists job — or at least ought to be — to follow up on their stories, until it can be satisfied the story is actually at an end. In the example of the game console rumour, go and speak to the source and find out what they think of the official information. Were they lying about what they knew, or did they actually know something interesting that was changed before the official announcement?

It remains a ambitious goal in practice. A feature I was working on adding into my site was a “reminder system” that would alert the writer to revisit the story, follow up, and see if there have been any developments.

This would’ve been very handy for the smaller news stories that don’t get a huge amount of traction. I always believed that if you’re going to task yourself with reporting events, then your job should be 99% archival work, 1% sensational headlines.

Recorded the events that are likely to be of interest to your readers carefully and throughly, even if the majority of your readers don’t come back to the old story to see new developments.

As I was designing the “reminder system” (which I actually named “Follow Up”), I decided the important features would be:

• an auto-generated message on each news article that states the date the reporter would post a follow-up
• an easy way for the reporter to post their follow ups. If the new event was minor, they could post a small “status update” on the original story. If the new event warranted its own report (page), they could easily link the two stories together
• a way to alert readers that a follow up is expected, or that a reporter is working on a follow up
• principles guiding the nature of the follow up, including ways to determine (and report) that there are seemingly no more threads to pull and the story is at its likely conclusion
• a way of tagging stories so the website can alert other reporters that their story is actually a follow up to someone else’s work

The intention was to extend this system to reviews, as its often the case that a game gets high marks, but then the developers release an update that might change how the game runs or feels, which ought to be reflected in the review (and the score in certain cases) so that the review always remains relevant.

Follow Up was ambitious and would’ve required a lot of dedication from the reporters. But the benefits would’ve been huge. Reporters would become subject matter experts on the stories they write. There would be a culture of knowledge and expertise, rather than “clickbait” as so many outlets devolve towards. And in the end, readers would know they could come and see the full story from start to end.

Do you think there would be much interest in a Follow Up system? Or are you satisfied that the media already have systems to determine when they should stop talking about their news stories?