Giant Bomb, in particular GBE, needs to do a better job covering the news

Some of you that know me outside of Reddit know that I have covered games and the business of games for nearly a decade, to everyone else, hi! I've covered games for various websites, and several newspapers, so I have a particular biased view on the topic of news dissemination. So take this with that in mind:

I'm going to try to keep this as constructive as possible, but I am overall pretty negative on the way Giant Bomb covers news, and East is the bigger offender. Giant Bomb needs to do better covering the news on their podcasts, or not do it at all. If you haven't paid attention to the internet (in particular), journalists are constantly under fire mostly because people don't know how sources work, but it is a position that has to be handled in a responsible manner.

Games aren't "Important" in the same way other topics are. No trade news is, really. But that doesn't change that misinformation being put out by those with a platform and means is less important. Giant Bomb can be very flippant about their news coverage. From the most recent Beastcast I will give an example: The story about the Xbox Series X games being cross compatible. One thing Vinny got wrong because he didn't read the full story (self admittedly, props on that) was the problem with not being able to target certain specs towards the end of the console's lifespan because they might have to take the previous generation into account. But Matt Booty specifically said the games were only going to be cross compatible "for a year or two."

That part of the conversation went on for several minutes, and if that's the only place you hear game news, you might come away thinking that the XSX (what the fuck are we gonna call that thing?) will be gimped for the entire generation. Brad and Vinny also took the stance of the hardware being less important now because of this news. Brad went a step further and worried that it would hamper innovation if they have to target an old spec; this is where their years of experience should have left them to infer some things. Such as new hardware matters regardless of what the bottom end target ever is with the example being PC. Yea, you can run Control on a GTX 970, but it will be at a fluctuating framerate with basically no effects. But if you have a 2080Ti, you are going to have all the bells and whistles and raytracing.

Disseminating that information can come one of two ways:

1. You aren't Microsoft's pitchmen, fuck them. They haven't said specifically how they are going to handle that, so you make it clear what they have and haven't said.

2. You still aren't Microsoft's pitchmen, so still, fuck them. But you can say why you expect a direction to be taken based on historical evidence and what they have said about Xbox's place in the gaming world and how the PC relates to it.

Neither approach is right or wrong, but the entire context matters to a story. News is irrelevant if it doesn't contain the context surrounding it. "Oscar Isaac is going to star in the movie adaptation of Ex Machina" was a story headline that confused people just this week!

That cross compatibility story was just one thing, and it isn't the biggest of deals, but there are a couple stories told every week that are half told, and leave people with more questions than they should. I believe every story they plan on covering should be studied by everyone on the podcast. They only cover a few stories, and each one is based on a five minute read. I don't believe this is too much of an ask.

Prep is very important to news coverage, and I don't think it should be one person that read most of a story talking to others that read none of it. Prereading the stories will increase quality discussion as it gives folks an idea of what leading questions they can ask, and allows for a clearer final picture.

I hope I'm not being too much of an asshole, but as I mentioned, it is something I'm invested in, and I think it is within their ability to improve upon. Thanks for coming to the world's worst Ted talk.