It's interesting how many are championing leak posting as the realist of "real reporting", and how many others are condemning leakers for spoiling announcements despite it being to their advantage in that they get to know info early...
Fact is, very little of what gets posted up as news on sites is really "news" at all. The Stampers leaving Rare, that was news. Satoru Iwata's death, that was news. But game announcements and/or leaks aren't news in that same way. Somebody breaks the news that AAA Game X is in the works? Over 200 people working in an office somewhere already had known that for two years!
Those people making the game, they chose not to tell anybody because it was their news to tell, and they wanted to tell it when they were ready and excited to. It's their money on the line if the announcement goes poorly or hits too early to crest the hype wave correctly. It's their pride hanging out there if their game is revealed with unprepared material or with leaks that reveal story spoilers. And it's all of their reputations and careers on the line if all 200 of them agree to follow a marketing plan (even if it's some marketing guru with dollar signs in his eyes who's drafting this plan with their creation) but then somebody breaks ranks and spills the news in order to see his leak in headlines...
But at some point, the existence of that game does become "news". So whose news is it? Sometimes it's the maker's news, who get to stand on a stage and show off their work to the world, or send out a press release (through PR) to make the disclosure on their terms. Sometimes it's some magazine or journalist's official news, where a journalist or site has been given the scoop (by PR) or came up with the news and negotiated reveal terms (again through PR, but with a different power play) to break the story on shared terms. And sometimes it's some journalist or blogger's unofficial news, where they did some digging or used (but hopefully not abused) some source to get news on his or her terms.
The reader doesn't really care how he gets his info, and as much as he enjoys a good E3 reveal, he's probably in favor of the unofficial journalist (however he gets the job done) because that one gets him the info first. People can (and do) get hurt in the process, and the journalist championed as the "real reporter" isn't doing it for journalistic integrity, he's doing it for clicks and visibility, but the reader finds out the news as early as possible, for whatever that's worth.
...Since there's not "news" in these news stories, though, there's room for different kinds of journalism. Because journalism isn't just about tracking down the details, it's about telling the story. Maybe writing quality doesn't matter in today's fast-paced, quickly-recycled, hacked-down-to-bulletpoints news cycle, but presentation quality does. "Video or it didn't happen", right? A game announced with no trailer or with some long-winded talking head "developer interview" with no footage is often about as good to us as no game announcement at all.
We want to have it both ways. We want sneak press fucks going out there digging up info, but we want journalists and PR to prep a story right (ideally with the journalists telling the story honestly even though they're entering the PR lair by invite.) And I do believe we used to have it both ways for a while at some point in gaming "journalism". Scoops would be earned, and tabloid leaks would be hacked out; plus big reveals were done by careful and well-managed studios. Everybody would take turns being blackballed, and those who made a habit of it still had other ways of making a living in the press.
I can't put a finger on when that was (maybe that golden era was just in my mind,) but things have since changed. Fewer retail games and the dawn of AAAA mega-blockbusters means that only a handful of stories really are worth chasing. Exponentially more downloadable games and the fallout of game pricing has devalued the middle ground of games that used to keep interest and attract dedicated genre fans. Fewer dedicated press outlets but more news-processing sites and video bloggers has meant not many newsmen chasing the story when it's easier to just regurgitate somebody else's scoop. The rise of internal devblogs and social networks (sometimes honestly social, but often times more an arm of PR) means that the company making the story gets to tell the story, and the press is on the outside begging for scraps. Lack of interest in specialist types of press (Japanese-oriented sites, console-specific sites, female gamer sites, parent gamer sites, indie no-sponsor-dollars sites) has driven everybody towards the middle in order to cover the CoD/GTA games that attract the vast majority of interest. The digital video revolution has meant that stories take longer and more manpower to produce than simple text articles, (plus higher demands of presentation quality from viewers,) making it more necessary than ever to cooperate in order to prep the material. Shifts in the advertising market have made it difficult to look anywhere but the games industry for advertising, making the separation of church and state difficult (and even if a journalist honestly manages that separation, his reputation can still be thrashed by people who think they know how he does his job.) Nobody believes in journalists as being anything other than money-grubbing shills, but nobody wants to pay journalists (even turning off ad-blocker or not quoting entire articles is out of the question) to do the work that we say is so valuable and righteous...
Journalism is screwed in a whole bunch of ways. But in the past, these things used to work themselves out, because it was never as bad as people complained about, and never mattered as much as people (and journalists) held it up to be. (This ain't Edward R Morrow shouting down McCarthy, this is simply news & views on our favorite artform.) Maybe in the present, it's too screwed to work out? Good work is still being done in journalism, both on the official and the tabloid end, but there are certainly issues, maybe circumstances are too far gone to set them all right.
