Alex Hinkley, a former journalist at Examiner.com, was fired for an article he wrote on June 25th. In the interview he does with HipHopGamer, he explains how articles pass through a screening room once they go up on the site. This means that Examiner.com screened the article he wrote, reviewed it, then gave the okay for it to be up. Five days later, developers start making a fuss about the article and subsequently Alex is fired.
The article in question criticized the spending and salaries of developers in the gaming industry–talking about how the salaries of big names in the companies drive up the overall cost of the games and making the games themselves be more expensive to cover that higher cost. Whether the views and supporting data was accurate I cannot say. Alex states that some companies have said his numbers were correct while others have said they were incorrect.
Hinkley claims the article sat on the site for five days and received no response, and everyone at Examiner.com was okay with it. Then, after a week of receiving no response, developers start coming at Alex with accusations. Examiner.com approached Alex, who had been working for them for over four years, and fired him to prevent the relationships of their other writers in the industry from being effected.
Being that there is a screening process set up so that inaccurate articles are not posted, and that this article went through that process, Alex should not have been fired. If there was a problem with the article the correct action would have been to remove it and discuss the situation with Alex and the team that screened the article. As an intern in the gaming journalism industry this is a huge blow to me; that any company could do an individual like that is beyond unjust. Luckily, Alex has received better offers from other locations that he refrained from naming, and he remains in good spirits about the industry as a whole.
This isn’t the first time I have seen something like this, however it’s the first time I’ve seen it within the journalism world. I experienced situations like this in the military, where luckily it took more than a little effort to get someone fired. However, when personal opinions in journalism can get you fired, it makes it rather difficult to dig into those deep dark secrets within the industry. I just hope people aren’t discouraged by this and continue to write what they think is right, given they do the research to back it up.
Good luck Alex, and I hope your journalism career continues forward.
Published: Jul 18, 2013 04:45 am