On the afternoon of March 21, 2024, Kotaku EIC Jen Glennon took to Twitter to announce that she would be parting ways with the gaming media outlet Kotaku, stating in her tweet that “Jim Spanfeller is an herb”.
As reported by Aftermath and retweeted by Glennon, the reason for Glennon’s departure as EIC has to do with a change in focus for the site. The management for Kotaku will be prioritizing gaming guides over news pieces in the future.
According to Aftermath, the remaining staff at Kotaku will now be expected to write an outrageous 50 guides a week. The site will also be adding a new “game tips and guides” widget despite objections from both staff and readers.
As tweeted by Nathan Grayson, writer of the Aftermath article, this management choice was made by G/O Media and forced onto Kotaku. A near-impossible task for the site’s small staff of writers, a task that none of them had signed up for when hired by the website.
g/o media is effectively forcing kotaku to pivot away from news and demanding that its staff of seven writers churn out an impossible number of guides per week. not what writers signed up for and not why people visit kotaku in the first place. stupid and cruel https://t.co/3oWbMlccUN pic.twitter.com/gQVL0vMYHz — Nathan Grayson (@Vahn16) March 21, 2024
This decision by G/O Media to pivot Kotaku toward writing guides becomes even more baffling when one considers recent changes to the Google search algorithm which have made sites that video game guides be pushed to readers less, vastly limiting the potential of this new approach.
To make this change in editorial edict somehow even more baffling, Glennon would reply to questions about the guides requested of Kotaku writers saying that they would be asked to write guides for games nearly a decade old.
In a tweet from Glennon replying to Tamoor Hussain, editor for GameSpot, about how he suspected that the current change in direction for Kotaku would lead to AI written guides to slip in the ex-EIC stated “That’s my suspicion as well!”.
From both a reader’s perspective and a business perspective this decision by G/O Media makes very little sense and is a bad direction to take Kotaku in. One can only hope that the writers currently on staff can handle the work given to them until this decision is reversed or they can find another site to work for.