Forum:Quality of News

I feel we need to have a serious discussion about the quality of news, both Call of Duty and Community related, on the Wiki. There seems to have been a significant drop in quality of News Blogs, which I feel has likely led to our decreasing viewership and userbase.

On the community side, and I don't mean to single out Deathman here, but look at the most recent community blog User blog:Deathmanstratos/CoDWiki News - February 2, 2014. The only part of the blog that provides any information is the Call of Duty-related section. The whole blog is littered with improper grammar and in-jokes and the Community and Other News sections barely have any purpose being there considering they don't actually seem to report any news. I'm not against having fun, having a bullet point that says "Redskin-26 and Tubw understand my hype behind TTGL now." or "I'm addicted to Dark Souls since I got it for like, five dollars." is fine, but there should be actual news mixed in there with it. The "messy, dumb, grammatically incorrect" version of the weekly news was funny and cool the first couple times it was done, and when it was done by N7 exclusively. Since this is what we've been getting more and more consistently, I think it needs to be said that we need some kind of quality control.

On the game news side of things, I feel the blogs need to be better written and written more frequently. This part of the problem stems from many things, including News Team fatigue, Laziness, desire to get it over quickly, and honestly just lack of care. Once again, i'm not trying to single anyone out but I'm going to use Argo's recent Achievements blog as an example. User blog:Argorrath/Call of Duty: Ghosts Onslaught achievements revealed. The introductory sentence feels improperly written and hard to read, the image is thrown in there and since it's not centered it just feels like it was kinda dropped in, and then the news blog just ends. A little stinger with some kind of message for the community, even a little reminder of when the DLC will release, goes a long way. A more personal complaint of mine is that there's also no Game related header for the Ghosts news blogs, despite us having one for BO, MW3, and BOII. Finally, there's no proper source, something I feel ALL News Team members really need to start doing again. I feel like we need to pay much better attention to the quality of our news blogs, and make them look less messy and like effort was put into them.

My final point, which I've already mentioned, is that our news frequency has dropped DRAMATICALLY. Just to represent what I'm talking about here [charlieintel.com] ran 41 Call of Duty related news articles in the month of January alone. We ran a grand total of 8. I know we aren't Charlieintel, we don't have an actual staff like they do and we don't have similar connection to them. But there was a time when we used to report every bit of Call of Duty news we could, often citing Charlieintel and other websites, even twitter as our source. We used to be a real source for Call of Duty news for a lot of people, and I feel that's fading.

I'm open to suggestions and discussion as to how to improve the quality of our news team in all regards. 22:20, February 3, 2014 (UTC)