Yesterday the interwebnettubes were all ablaze with the news that Alex Rigopulus, CEO of Harmonix, had said the Rock Band library would be at 5000 songs before the end of 2009.[more info] Upon seeing the number I figured it was just a typo and some gungho journalist had nearly peed himself thinking the number was correct and reported it as such. It then spread, as these stories do, from site to site never receiving the benefit of basic journalistic fact checking.

MTV Games/Harmonix quickly countered with Rigopulus' actual statement to Ars Technica which didn't say anything about 5000 songs by the end of 2009. He said "as the catalog expands from 500 songs to 5,000 songs or whatever in the coming years...". No part of that comment looks to me like a promise of 5000 songs by the end of the year. It doesn't even look like a promise of 5000 songs, just a general comment about the potential size of Rock Bands library at some time in the game's future.
Source: Destructoid [ more info ]

So yeah, I've been pretty critical of gaming news lately. And, I think, rightfully so. It seems like sites are just regurgitating information without bother to do the most cursory of checks. One of my dreams for GU was to open a news site that approached all stories with the same attitude as the comics. But, honestly, I'm not interested in becoming just another one of those kind of sites. I'd rather watch the dream wither on the vine.

Alrighty, enough of my whining. And when Rock Band DOES hit 5000 songs, I'll probably be there.

on a totally off topic. I just noticed your window header there, picking noses and m&ms don't mix.

I write articles for Wikinews, and we see the same thing in our sources. Almost all news agencies (CNN, Fox, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and even slightly more reliable news agencies like the BBC) simply copy and paste articles from the Reuters and the Associated Press newswires.

They don't write anything of their own, and they don't think before they run a story. This leads to errors propagating throughout the media at lightning speed, because they don't have any factchecking people of their own (and they've ALL fired nearly their entire investigative journalism departments to save money). Sometimes it is a minor thing, like having every news agency misspell the name of a US Coastguard ship (Mellon, Melon :P), but sometimes they publish stories that are simply complete bull.

Sure, two days later they retract the inaccurate story, but studies have shown that that doesn't matter; once a news article hits the press, people believe it. Even if you later retract the article it makes no difference.

It's a real problem. Much of the problem comes from two places: 1)it's cheaper to buy their news from moderately-reliable sources like Reuters then it is to do in-house research, and 2)they've started viewing news as part of their companies' "entertainment" divisions, so factual accuracy isn't important as long as the news brings in ratings/pagehits. (As an example, CNN recently cancelled their entire science division, because science isn't entertaining enough.)

Problem number 2 has obvious consequences ("And now we bring you our top story. A cute fluffy dog has won a dog show in New York!"), but the first problem is more subtle. It isn't an obvious issue because Reuters *is* reliable most of the time. So why is it bad to use them? It isn't. The bad part is that now nearly all news comes from only two sources. Since there aren't any competing news agencies for Reuters and AP, there is no one to catch their mistakes, and their biases. That's why I think that Wikinews (and other similar citizen journalism sites) are important.

wow 5000 songs. i wonder if they will have you doing row, row, row your boat, the wheels on the buss go round and round, and happy birthday on it. lol


so what will be the next game? first guitar hero, then rock band. next is orchestra

Rock Band Kid Edition!
Ozzy does Row Row your Boat!
Slayer gets on the Bus!
Gwar is coming to your birthday party!

But yeah... Interwebitudified rumorization with a mix of sensationalistic, fact ignoring, quote what you want, not what they said, attention grabbing crap and no accountablility is the norm these days. Integrity be damned, it's all about the web hits and the ads!

This is also why I stopped watching TV and nightly news back in 2004. They are just as bad, if not worse. I was at a friend's house for dinner last night and they had CBS News going and after 5 minutes of Katie Curic I flipped to Discovery without even asking them.

Originally Posted by tuckerpb2:

so what will be the next game? first guitar hero, then rock band. next is orchestra

Actually, a game called Mad Maestro came out about seven years ago...so technically the Orchestra game was here before Guitar Hero and Rock Band. :-)
Source: Wikipedia [ more info ]

I saw the five thousand song story yesterday and I knew it had to be some sort of journalistic hyperbole.

One of the main things is if they report non factual story, on let's say on the first few pages to catch peoples eyes, with large text, and eye catching words...then they have to put in a retraction, it get's put on like page 35, in an inch by inch area, stuck in between ads that just about nobody reads, going 'oops, we had the wrong facts, our bad' in the smallish text possible.

I'll give you an example:

Our newspaper here has sections, on one Sunday they showed a picture of, what looks like someone about to punch out another person, with the story attached about a 'slum lord' getting angry at a group of tenants at a meeting to discus having their apartments fixed.
The 'picture' was a set up, the landlord was reeling back from having said 'punchee' jump into their face before the meeting had started. The 'discussion' was about the tenants wanting reductions in their rent for work not being done...THAT WAS NEVER REPORTED.
You are probably asking 'well how do you know this?' Well, I was there for that 'discussion' and I was one of maintenance crew for that apartment complex. The truth was never told by any of the local news agencies, no retraction was ever printed.

So...I take what is reported in the news, with a Titanic iceberg sinking size grain a salt.

Originally Posted by Mordican:

Ozzy does Row Row your Boat!

This would be so awesome.

knowing my luck, 4999 of the songs will be songs i dont like......

just wanted to point out something, woody... you kinda already do run your own little news site... only.. you make fun of people who can't do their job correctly, and then tell us why / how they screwed up... you're like the webcomic version of the Daily Show, but you focus on gaming news, not politics. keep up the good work