Former president of Dennis Publishing (Maxim, Blender, etc) Steven Colvin will soon be leaving his year-old postion as head of CNET / CBS Interactive entertainment and lifestyle division (Gamespot, mp3.com, tv.com, Chow, etc). Within the department, Colvin is widely believed to be the "brains" behind Jeff Gerstman's unceremonious canning last December. Just before the firing, Colvin spent hours in a meeting with Eidos attempting to salvage the relationship after Gerstman's negative review of Kane and Lynch. No word on if this departure is volunary or not, but his role is being taken over by CBSi COO Steve Snyder, which might be indicative of hardly-unexpected "restructuring" occuring sooner rather than later. Control of one of the department's largest assets, tv.com, was recently transfered out of the department.

There was also an annoucement today that CNET's extremely generous vacation hours package will be discontinued after this year, sick time hours will be reduced, health care providers will be changed, and benefits cut for "opposite-sex domestic partners", in order to be "consistent with CBS' company-wide poilcy".

On the plus side, parking fees can now be paid pre-tax.

the terrible irony, shawn rose should never have been hired to run tv in the first place, as he talks and talks his way into all kinds of crazy shit. now another suit replaces the suit they booted, and this one's wearing purple. he literally got nothing done at Y, and to date, has done nothing at CNET

another examaple of how over-puffed-up yahoos wiggle into new digs and maintain that same level of low-productivity and paper pushing...

i'm a former cneter with friends at both companies, and it's just sad to see a good (though embroiled) talent like Larson go, for a sucker like Rose - all my contacts on the inside are literally scratching their heads... totally blindsided the team... they feel like chumps because no one told them this was coming

if Rose gets you in a room, he doesn't shut up... talks and talks, and his claim to fame that he'll invariably bring up to everyone he meets, is that he created some search engine that he sold to AltaVista some 10 years ago. Something I'm sure he made a few bucks on, enough to buy a small bit of vineyard up north, but something that is so entirely irrelevant to any current internet job it's laughable

To paraphrase Petraglia's rant: He mocks Gamespot writers, who are now forced to choose between padding advertisers' review scores or losing their jobs. Right as if CNET would be stupid enough to incite another PR fiasco. Sorry, we fail to be outraged. Media companies don't care about their writers. Reporters are nothing more than expendable, semiskilled labor.

Despite the chicken and the egg scenario (you can't sell ads if there isn't content, you can't pay people to create content without ad sales), sales staff land the multimillion dollar deals that dictate everything from magazine cover themes to advertorial packages. You don't need a bloody beheading to point out the disparity — just glance at the parking lot. All those Infiniti G37s belong to sales. Editorial is lucky to be cruising about in a used Ford Focus.

Gerstmann's termination is merely the symptom; the disease is the contempt in which you are held by any publisher who would attempt to intimidate you over your opinion and any business operation that refuses to support you in the face of such intimidation. This is considered an acceptable way to deal with the specialist press, in a way it would not be with the mainstream media.

The deal with the devil that the business side of enthusiast outlets struck long ago—taking advertising dollars from the very companies that they cover—has become increasingly Faustian in recent years. Metacritic or Game Rankings scores have rapidly become shorthand for product quality. As such, individual scores carry that much more weight—that goes double for heavily trafficked outfits like GameSpot — and publishers therefore fixate on any scores that might drag down that average.

There is still much to be revealed — it's rare that a single incident results in the firing of a beloved employee.

From: Scott Wolf To: paul@valleywag.com RE: Gerstmann

Don't for one second think that this kind of thing is unusual. Publishers and editors use "the appearance of integrity" as a smokescreen for their subsidized spinelessness more often than you want to know.

In 1997 I was fired as a Contributing Editor for PC Gamer magazine for publishing independently online a column about advertiser involvement PCG had already rejected. When Editors Dan Bennett and Gary Whitta learned of its publication I was fired immediately ... by email. No mention was ever made of my departure and writer Mike Wolf suddenly became PCG's "Wolf" in my place.

In 2001, I was writing the Eye In The Sky column for Furball: The UN-Official Dawn of Aces & WarBirds Site. I made a habit of berating IEN for consistently breaking promises to devote more time and resources to Dawn of Aces. IEN finally gave Furball's Matt "Target" Davis (now an IEN employee) an ultimatum: Either lose me or lose their support. I quit rather than make Matt fire me.

I'm not really sure what I want to do next. This whole situation has left me with a lot to think about. While this sort of clean break would be an acceptable time to think about trying game development, I feel like I still have more to say and do on the editorial side of the fence, too...Despite the number of people who are taking these rumors ... to mean that game writing is ethically bankrupt, I don't feel that's the case. Either way, I'm currently keeping my options open and have been in contact with interesting people on both sides."

Kotaku got a longer if less poignant spiel from CNET's improbably named director of public relations, Leslie Dotson Van Every:

"GameSpot takes its editorial integrity extremely seriously. For over a decade, GameSpot and the many members of its editorial team have produced thousands of unbiased reviews that have been a valuable resource for the gaming community. At CNET Networks, we stand behind the editorial content that our teams produce on a daily basis."

We're very clear in our review policies that all reviews are vetted by the entire team before they go live - everything that goes up is the product of an entire team's output. Our freelancers are especially guilty of making snide comments, but those are always yanked before the review goes live, because everyone in the office reads these reviews and makes sure they're up to our standards before they get put up.

If there was a problem with his reviews, then it would've been a problem with the entire team. Firing him without telling anyone implies that anyone else on this team can be fired at the drop of a hat as well, because none of us are writing any differently or meaner or less professionally than we were two years ago before the management changed. I'm sure management wants to spin this as the G-Man being unprofessional to take away from the egg on their face that results after a ten-year employee gets locked out of his office and told to leave the premises and then no one communicates anything to us about it until the next day.

This management team has shown what they're willing to do. Jeff had ten years in and was fucking locked out of his office and told to leave the building.

What you might not be aware of is that GS is well known for appealing mostly to hardcore gamers. The mucky-mucks have been doing a lot of "brand research" over the last year or so and indicating that they want to reach out to more casual gamers. Our last executive editor, Greg Kasavin, left to go to EA, and he was replaced by a suit, Josh Larson, who had no editorial experience and was only involved on the business side of things. Over the last year there has been an increasing amount of pressure to allow the advertising teams to have more of a say in the editorial process; we've started having to give our sales team heads-ups when a game is getting a low score, for instance, so that they can let the advertisers know that before a review goes up. Other publishers have started giving us notes involving when our reviews can go up; if a game's getting a 9 or above, it can go up early; if not, it'll have to wait until after the game is on the shelves.

I was in the meeting where Josh Larson was trying to explain this firing and the guy had absolutely no response to any of the criticisms we were sending his way. He kept dodging the question, saying that there were "multiple instances of tone" in the reviews that he hadn't been happy about, but that wasn't Jeff's problem since we all vet every review. He also implied that "AAA" titles deserved more attention when they were being reviewed, which sounded to all of us that he was implying that they should get higher scores, especially since those titles are usually more highly advertised on our site.

I know that it's all about the money, and hey, I like money. I like advertising because it pays my salary. Unfortunately after Kasavin left the church-and-state separation between the sales teams and the editorial team has cracked, and with Jeff's firing I think it's clear that the management now has no interest at all in integrity and are instead looking for an editorial team that will be nicer to the advertisors.

When companies make games as downright contemptible as Kane and Lynch, they deserve to be called on it. I guess you'll have to go to Onion or a smaller site for objective reviews now, because everyone at GS now thinks that if they give a low score to a high-profile game, they'll be shitcanned. Everyone's fucking scared and we're all hoping to get Josh Larson removed from his position because no one trusts him anymore. If that doesn't happen then look for every game to be Game of the Year material at GameSpot.

The only offense we see is that his words were much harsher than his written review. Gerstmann called Kane & Lynch an "ugly, ugly game" and characterized the developers as "lazy," but he still gave the game a 6 out of 10 score. Some choice quotes from his video review:

It's a really clever idea because you never really know who's gonna turn and win. Unfortunately the shooting isn't very accurate or very much fun to pull off. Also, the AI's in the exact same spot every time you play the map. So it's like, you know that these cops are gonna be here, there's gonna be two cops over the fence ... it just becomes really repetitive really really quickly ... By and large, it's a fairly standard shooter that doesn't really have mechanics that live up to the standards of the genre. If you're a fan of shooters, you're gonna be frustrated... If you have a chance to see it ... Take a look at it, but it's probably not worth purchasing.