Tag: Journalism

Love, Hate & the internet: Abusive Fandoms

A few days ago, a friend told me “fandoms are weird” and I told him people were weird, but now I find myself agreeing with him.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild released a couple of weeks ago, and as you know I absolutely adore it and I enjoy every minute of my time with it. I not only like the game but I’m glad it received so many high reviews and that the sales have been great. I’m a giant Nintendo fan so I like hearing about them doing well.

But not every reviewer has the same standards or tastes, and every opinion is different. Reviews are opinions, educated opinions, sure, but experience and personal preferences play heavily into the text of a review and even more so the score. I’ve said it before that while I do argument my reviews and mention what I disliked and why, the score is absolutely subjective. It’s why you get scores of 6/5 sometimes, and lower or higher scores than the average. Continue reading Love, Hate & the internet: Abusive Fandoms

Journalist Evolution – My Worst Articles

As a writer, my skills and personal style are constantly growing, always maturing and changing. Just on experience, what I write today is going to be better (sorta) that what I wrote yesterday (maybe). But sometimes you have to go back and analyse your articles and fiction to find out what was wrong there, what mistakes you made and what you can learn from them. So today, as part of my continuous growth as a writer and (amateur) journalist, I’ll talk about my worst articles. These were flawed pieces from the get-go, and had an immense impact on me. Continue reading Journalist Evolution – My Worst Articles

The Proper Way – Language in Journalism

Over the past few weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about the work I do in The Mental Attic and other outlets, be it a geeky piece on GeekOut South-West, a preview on KickstartVentures or any of the other sites I write for on occasion.

One thing that I’ve thought of repeatedly is language, as in what kind of language is appropriate for articles? Is it right to use profanity or rude language in an article or does that diminish your arguments? Are abbreviations or common “text-speech” allowed? Can we use pure numbers or do we have to word the amounts out (30 or Thirty)? For today, I’ll focus on profanity. Continue reading The Proper Way – Language in Journalism

Journalist Reflections – The Role of the Reviewer

I’m a reviewer. No, I don’t get paid for it (I wish), but I still think of myself as a reviewer. I take on games, series, films and books, consume them and then write down my arguments on what is good or bad about them. I sometimes receive these products directly from the developers/authors but other times I just buy them myself.

Lately I’ve been thinking of what the role of the reviewer is. Where should our focus lie, our loyalty and towards what do we strive? I’ve asked a few people I know, or things have come up in conversations that have made me consider the impact our reviews have. I don’t mean just on our readers but on the people who publish their different work for us to then mercilessly butcher.

I’ve narrowed my study to three key areas, plus a final one I feel is the most important: what do we review, for whom do we do it and how do we review? The last one is all about actually doing it, the presentation. Continue reading Journalist Reflections – The Role of the Reviewer