Hating the love-hate.

In the category of Excellence in News Reporting, our three judges hated so many stories precisely because they wanted to love them so much.

Journalists are complicated like that.

First off, all the entries from last year’s big winner were disqualified. For the inaugural Kunkels, the venerable website Kotaku took first, second, and tied for third place for news posts published in 2015. But for 2016, readers submitted a half-dozen Kotaku entries that were also published in 2015.

For example, The Real Stories Behind E3’s Glossy Game Demos contains this line after the first paragraph: This story originally appeared June 9, 2015.

The judges agreed that’s lame. So onward and downward.

Of the 90-plus remaining entries, most failed to follow basic principles. Journalism is already a scorned profession, so it’s more crucial than ever that every claim be backed up by reliable sources. Yet the judges couldn’t find a third-place winner.

“Everything else was either single-sourced, a feature story, a blog or any combination of the three,” one judge lamented.

That judge was looking at this Breitbart story for third place: Censorship makes the biggest release for ‘Fire Emblem’ also its worst. Journalists are sympathetic when other people get censored, but the story didn’t back up the provocative headline. As another judge ranted…

He writes, “Memes have replaced meaningful dialogue…” That’s opinion, bro. More importantly, the main claim isn’t supported at all. If the localization team ruined the game by changing shit, tell me why changing that shit ruined the game. Change in its own right isn’t always bad. Claim. Support claim. Claim. Support claim. This isn’t too complicated.

This year, it was.

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