In the first two parts of this series, published a week ago, this author looked at the inherent problems involved in working within a single-topic industry. Very bad things happen when the businesses in charge also control the media whose task it is to report on the industry, as I illuminated with a couple of pointed examples from poker’s recent history.
So what happens when media outlets becoming beholden to the very sites and/or live casinos on which they’re reporting? Oftentimes, they mail it in, and the writing and the supposed reporting of news becomes a giant shuck played upon otherwise unsuspecting readers.
A few weeks back, a former colleague of mine, Barry Carter, wrote a blog in which he mentioned that one of his most serious mistakes was in writing a hard news story about the UB/AP scandals for PokerNews, a task which almost got him fired.
At least I think it was Barry; I can no longer find the piece, so if someone else remembers it or has it bookmarked, please let me know. Did Barry pull it down or modify it? Was it a different writer? Perhaps, and I don’t think so, but whatever.
The topic itself is what’s important here. Both Barry and I worked for a while for PokerNews, and those stories that a lot of media writers and outlets refused to write about the UltimateBet and Absolute Poker scandals? I wrote them, and I fought hard against the return of AP and UB banners and affiliate links when they returned at PN a couple of years later.
I haven’t yet told the full story of my departure from PokerNews, but if you want to think about as a den of cheap marketers hiding under the pretense of a site name with “News” in its domain and title, you’d be about right. During the two of its previous editors, the American-based, “dot-com” site was a reliable venue for real poker news, and outside of that combined time frame, which lasted three years or so, the site’s been a shuck.
Did Barry get in trouble for wanting to write real news? Maybe so, and as corporate structures would have it, Barry reported directly to the people who ran the European portions of PokerNews. Besides Tony G, that was the Dutchie gang headed Noah Boeken and Jordy Veenboer, along with Robbie Davies, who gets called the CEO of the outfit, for reasons undeterminable.
If you actually wanted to write (or read) real poker news, you couldn’t trust any of the batch. Their interests were solely about deriving income through affiliate signups. Readers? Those were a commodity and nothing else, from which dollars were to be extracted via signups.
The question you should be asking is, “So what’s wrong with that?”
The answer is nothing — unless you portray yourself as a purveyor of “news”, which PokerNews surely did and still does. Simply by using that word, one assumes a responsibility toward the reader, and I can tell you this from the inside: That was a responsibility that the powers that be at PokerNews refused to accept.
The tale Barry told (or at least, I think it was Barry) emanated from that struggle. The easy option is to sell out, go with the flow, refuse to report honestly on tough stories that have the potential to damage your business partners. But by refusing to report honestly, one runs the risk of damaging one’s customers, the readers.
That’s the horrible tradeoff. If one were producing content for a site called CheapPokerClearanceCodes.com, then I’d say no problem; let the buyer beware. But once you voluntarily take on the reporting of “news’, then you assume an inherent responsible of honesty toward your readers.
I don’t want to pick on Barry, trust me. I like the guy, and I’m sure he suffered all the same PokerNews idiocies that I did. There are dozens, if not hundreds of poker outlets and writers who are guilty of the very same thing, in a not-proud tradition that goes all the way back to the early days of CardPlayer. And, as I said, it’s in some ways an inevitable by-product of working in any single-topic industry, when all the income is derived from a simple engine at its core — in this case, the revenue generated by online sites and live casinos, and not much else.
Given that, it’s not hard that so many outlets and writers give up fighting the good fight. But as for me, I haven’t quit quite yet.
100% up to $3,000 Bonus
Bovada is our most recommended ONLINE CASINO and POKER ROOM for US players with excellent deposit options. Get your 100% signup bonus today.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.