{ What ever happened to a good article? }
posted Monday, January 6, 2003 by Nebula[CSR]
Those of you who knew me early on enough in the show, know that I used to work for a couple of gaming news sites. The first, which I ran myself, called the Forge, and the second called the BackBurner. It was through working on these sites that I came across (and fell in love with) CS Radio in the first place. I even took the first opportunity to interview Van and post it on the Forge. However, call me incredibly old fashioned, through all the time I've been around in the Half-Life community I've noticed a slow and steady decline in good articles.

Now when I was in action, I was an absolute wizard with articles. The way I saw it, news was important to keep people coming back daily, but it was a second best to a good read. And I wrote articles that people absolutely loved to read. I could knock up good (as in quality, maybe not opinion always) reviews in half and hour. I could make creative articles in even less. The moment I had the list of interview answers back from an interviewee, it took me minutes to format it all and have it ready for posting. Add a few minutes in PaintShop to edit the image thumbnails (every article needs some good images) and it was all ready.

And you know what? I absolutely loved that. The Forge, the site I ran almost completely under my own steam, gave me no end of pride. This was because I could look at it and see that I'd done a good job. Not only was all the news updated the moment I found something to write about. Not only did I make a point of introducing myself and the site to most every mod that came along, but I kept a detailed ICQ list (which I still own today, but is probably too out of date) of all my mod contacts so I could keep updated on their progress. Van would probably recognise this from the first time I talked to him on ICQ. But overall, what I loved the most was that every day, I'd have a new article for the readers to enjoy. Whether it was a review or an interview or whatever, there was always something new. Every day.

In my eyes, that made my site better than every other Half-Life site out there. Even the people getting paid for what they do at Planet Half-Life. In fact, Planet Half-Life, bemoaning their lack of actual content, actually asked me to work for them. I accepted, and was for a short time part of their staff. I was fired not too long after I was hired, officially for trivial reasons, the ACTUAL reason being the PHL Site Director looked at the Forge every day and wanted me to do all that content for PHL.

Anyway, if you look at the community today, things have changed. Take exclusive pictures, for instance. Back when I was at the Forge, exclusive pictures (or preview pictures) were rarer and more interesting. If you were as connected as I was, sometimes a few pics would filter through to you from different mods showing the development in process. These were always good pics, which had obviously been taken because someone was proud of what they've done. If they did come to me, I'd simply ask "Do you mind if I post these?" and if they didn't mind, up they'd go in the news. And they belonged to your site, because you'd recived them personally, requested if you could post them, and put the work in. Your site all of a sudden had something for the readers to look at that no other site had. Just before I left gaming sites, a disturbing trend had popped up. Exclusives, weren't actually exclusing anymore. Mods would just take pictures of anything they wanted (this included crappy looking grey models taken with a screen grab), attatch it to an e-mail, and send it off to all the news sites. All of a sudden, every news site from Half-Life Center to Half-Life.Net had that picture in their news, and every news post said "New Exclusive Pics". I despised this practice, because there was no longer any link to getting the pics and deserving the pics. And now all you have to do is wait three months for Planet Half-Life to load, and you'll notice that most every single news post they have has pictures with it.

But to make my point, while your at Planet Half-Life, supposedly the "best" Half-Life site around, take a look at their article history. It reads like this:

-PHL Poll
-PHL Poll
-PHL Poll
-PHL Mailbag
-PHL Poll
-CS Level of the Week
-PHL Mailbag
-PHL Poll

Now don't get me wrong, as much as taking a selection of the stupid people e-mailing you that fortnight and laughing at them in an article is a sort of distraction, it's no proper article. To put it in simpler terms: "It's no how you make porridge".

I know a lot of sites try, and I respect those sites that are, but somehow I think we've lost a big section of the Half-Life community with the article drought.

Tell me what you reckon.

-Nebby