December 10th, 2004

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Technology
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Interview with the EA Games Spouse

A while back I wrote about some apparently-exploitive labour practices at EA Games. I was prompted to do so by a spouse of an EA Games employee who wrote an online diary entry (now with a remarkable 3638 comments) about how hard her husband worked. She recently did an interview about her experience:

To be honest, I don’t have many expectations of EA itself. EA is a corporation and has made its stance quite clear - they have a bottom line, and that bottom line is lower than the bar for humane worker conditions. What I expect and hope is that the industry itself will take a stand and declare with one voice that this treatment is not acceptable. I do not know whether that will happen. Trying to get unity out of game developers is like herding cats - and I say that with tired affection.

That interview is about twice as long as it needs to be. I think inexperienced journalists are frequently unwilling to edit a Q-and-A interview, but it’s crucial to cut, edit and re-organize questions and answers to make a compelling piece.

Comments: 2 Responses so far

Ian
December 10th, 2004
12:40 pm

Unedited Q-and-A’s and other forms of stenographic journalism bore me to tears. The only thing worse than reading it is writing it.

(I also suspect that under-editing is more common among online types — looser space restrictions removes a lot of the motivation to chop pieces down to size.)

[Reply]

Andrea
December 11th, 2004
11:53 am

When I was in journalism school, I found that about half of my classmates couldn’t understand the concept of editing quotes, let alone interviews. They would provide long rambling quotes, instead of making the effort to “cut, edit and re-organize” work. When I later became a freelance editor for a magazine, I found that there were still lots of writers making the same mistake. (As a freelance editor, I couldn’t do much about it, other than edit.) But, once their work has been edited, they have a great piece for their portfolio — which they can use to get other editors to hire them.

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