Ask 100 game journalists how they landed their job in the gaming industry, and you’re very likely to get 100 different answers. While many journalists start out writing for tech publications, traditional newspapers, blogs, and other types of media outlets, the truth is that there isn’t really a clear cut career path for people who want to work in gaming journalism.
Believe it or not, that’s actually a good thing. It means that no matter what your education or employment background may be, there just might be a way for you to leverage your previous experiences into a career as a gaming journalist.
With that said, there are some obstacles that every gaming journalist needs to overcome before they can have a successful career in the industry. The good news is that GameSkinny can help you overcome all of them.
Here is a list of benefits that we offer our most valued writers:
Professional Feedback
As writers, we all want to receive feedback on our work. After all, it’s the only real way that we can know if what we’re writing is resonating with other people.
Unfortunately, it can be difficult to know who you should listen to and who you should ignore. Does that random commentor really know what they’re talking about, or are they trolling you? Do your friends and family really like your post, or are they just being nice? It’s all too easy to take advice from an ‘expert’ who doesn’t really have the experience to offer the advice they’re giving. Take the wrong advice, and you can sabotage your career before it even begins.
How we will help
When you submit an article to GameSkinny, you will get feedback from our team of professional editors. Not only will we help you fix up any spelling or gramatical mistakes that may have slipped by you, we’ll also help you learn how to write great titles and offer other suggestions for ways that you could make your future articles even better.
Whether you take our advice is up to you (you’re the writer, after all), but our goal is to help you become a better writer. When that happens, we all win.
Audience
If you’ve ever tried to start a gaming blog or a YouTube channel, you know how frustrating it can be to try and build an audience. There’s so much noise on the internet, and it can take many years before anybody even knows that you exist. How can you stand out?
This is a problem that we hear about all the time. In honesty, it’s one of the primary reasons that we started this site, and it’s why we truly believe that ‘Obscurity Sucks.’
On GameSkinny, we made life easier by building the audience for you. Write something great, and tens of thosuands of people may read it in a week. Try doing that with a WordPress blog. As far as we know, there’s never been an easier way to get your writing read by the masses.
Access
One of the biggest catch 22s for aspiring game journalists is this: nobody will give you access to the most important people in the industry until you’ve made a name for yourself. And you can’t make a name for yourself without access to the most important people in the industry.
Not to toot our own horn, but we’ve been around a long time and have some pretty great connections with some pretty amazing gaming companies. And guess what? We’ll help you make those connections too.
As you post more and more content on GameSkinny, you may be chosen to become a featured contributor. As a featured contributor, you will get access to an exclusive section of the site where we post assignments for whoever wants to take them.
Sometimes we need someone to interview a game developer about how a game is coming along.
Other times, we may need you to check out a game that’s in beta, or spend some quality gametime with a game that hasn’t even been released yet.
We’ve even given some contributors press passes to events like E3 and PAX. That kind of access is hard to get anywhere else.
In other words, we’re going to give you a ton of tools that you can use to really make a name for yourself as a gaming journalist. What you choose to do with them is up to you.
Why We Care
All of this may sound too good to true, and we understand if you’re a little bit skeptical. But the way we see it is, what’s good for your writing career is good for us.
See, our goal is to have the best gaming content on the internet right here on GameSkinny. The better you get at writing, the better our site is. The better our site is, the more people who read it. And the more people who read it, the more successful the site is. We think that’s a pretty fair deal.
Our number one goal is to help you become a better writer. We do that by giving you feedback, giving you an audience, and providing you with the industry access you need to launch your career in gaming journalism.
Get Started Now
Header Image courtesy of: davidd
Published: Jul 1, 2013 03:55 pm