This article originally appeared on GamePolitics.com on August 27, 2015.

“I’m very much an old school journalist,” Owen S. Good declares in our half-hour interview on the phone. Indeed, his background indicates he knows about old school journalism. His father was a newspaper editor for 10 years and then a publisher for another 30 years. Good received his Master’s from the prestigious Columbia University School of Journalism and, after devoting ten years of his own career to newspapers, he entered the tech industry. Now he serves as Senior Reporter for Polygon where he supervises the weekend news cycle.

It was during one of those weekend shifts he saw some tweets about a bomb threat disrupting the SPJAirplay panel covering GamerGate. He investigated. He called the Miami-Dade police department. He looked at local coverage. He spoke extensively with the host of the event, Michael Koretzky, the Region 3 Director of the Society of Professional Journalists. Good then wrote an article covering the bomb threat, published on August 16.

“A bomb threat in Miami yesterday cleared out and closed down a Society of Professional Journalists panel featuring some of the key figures of the GamerGate movement,” he began with a classic lead. He wrote the article in a “straight news” style, which presents the most important facts first and adds detail later, without the writer’s opinion.

“Yes, that was directly my intention,” he agreed when I asked if it was a conscious decision to go with a straight news style.

After filling in the details of the bomb threat, he used his last paragraph to summarize GamerGate, with a link to a letter from the editor critical of the controversy.

“The movement, which deliberately has no central leadership, is a backlash to what its supporters perceive as unprofessional or agenda-driven behavior in the gaming specialty press. However, figures like Yiannopoulos, Sommers and others have also sharply criticized feminist and other socially progressive criticism of games and their role in pop culture. Opponents of GamerGate call the movement misogynist and innately hostile to women, minorities and other marginalized groups of persons.”

The response to his article shows us how difficult it is to cover issues related to GamerGate.

Criticism, insults, and calls for firing Good were tweeted instantly by those opposed to the movement.

Zoe Quinn, the game developer whose private relationship would become the impetus that would eventually become the GamerGate movement, also took to Twitter to object to Good’s article. “[P]olygon seriously just completely washed out [GamerGate’s] origins,” she said. She told Randi Harper, another prominent figure in the GamerGate controversy, “[T]his shit makes me want to quit tech more than the fucking death threats do.”

I reached out to both Zoe Quinn and Randi Harper to give them a chance to elaborate on their criticism but after a brief exchange with Harper I have not heard back from either. I also reached out privately to some of the people who posted critical tweets to or about Good but none wished to go on record. One said he regretted his tweet.

I then reached out to the AgainstGamerGate forum on Reddit to get a better idea of what issues the anti-GamerGate side had with the article. A few people who describe themselves as against GamerGate (the subreddit is a debate forum with a mix of people both for and against) were surprised that there was criticism and said they thought the article was fair.

One speculated that the complaints, “seemed to stem from the idea [of] giving GamerGate the legitimacy of being a backlash against unethical journalism when it should have been cited as stemming from [Zoe Quinn’s] doxxing and harassment early on in the hashtag’s inception.”

Damion Schubert, Design Director at Boss Fight Entertainment, who has frequently spoken out against GamerGate on his blog, agreed with that assessment.

The criticism that he has seen is, “that the piece whitewashes both the inception of the clusterfuck, downplays the shady acts in [GamerGate’s] history and their attempts to bully people into their point of view, and attempt to describe their complaints as potentially legitimate, when, by and large, those complaints are frequently nonsensical or antithetical to where the industry wants or needs to go.”

Schubert pointed out, however, that he believes that level of detail wasn’t viable for what was already a long article. “I thought the piece was fine – but then I generally think Polygon’s coverage of most stories they choose to cover is pretty good.”

For his part, Owen Good seemed to roll with the punches. When I asked him if he was at all surprised that his article was controversial, he replied with a quick, “No” before I could finish the sentence. “I put the word ‘GamerGate’ in any article and I expect it to be controversial,” he said with a chuckle.

What does he think of the criticism?

“I don’t think of it much beyond it being the emotional reaction of someone to something they don’t like. I’m not going to intellectualize what these people’s comments are,” he told me. “They plainly want me to advocate for them and I’m unwilling to do that; not on something of this scale.”

To those who might suggest that this event was not newsworthy or that covering a GamerGate-related issue legitimized the movement, he said, “This was a bomb threat called in to a public building at Miami Dade College. Public resources were used and the public was involved there. That is as straight up a news event as you can get and I’m not going to get into that as some sort of platform to speak against GamerGate. That would be victim blaming.”

He went on to offer his take on GamerGate in general.

“There’s no percentage in it for me personally or professionally to pick a side [in the controversy],” he said. “And yes, there are two sides to it. What I see a lot of is people brigading on Twitter asking me to say there is no legitimate criticism of the media. It might be an ulterior or secondary subtext to GamerGate, but it’s still there. And they have made legitimate criticism of games media’s professionalism, of their standards, and of their consistency, and I’ve said that before.”

Clearly it is not an easy subject to cover, which I personally learned when writing my article on a way of collectively interviewing a large group of anonymous GamerGate supporters. I wanted to look at how other journalists have covered the movement, so I reached out to two writers who have spent significant time on the controversy’s front lines. Neither are straight news journalists – indeed, there have been very few straight news pieces written about GamerGate – but both have written extensively about it and are often cited by people both for and against the movement.

Jesse Singal is Senior Editor of Science of Us, New York magazine’s social-science website, and also the Boston Globe’s video game columnist. As a columnist he was immediately critical of GamerGate, calling it “a big, loud, embarrassing controversy” in his piece “Gaming’s summer of rage.”

I exchanged emails with Singal to discuss the difficulties he had covering the movement.

“It’s impossible to say exactly what GamerGate’s side is with certainty, because GamerGate doesn’t exist as a real-world concept in the way a chair or a political action committee does,” he wrote. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t develop a strong sense of the movement, and in GamerGate’s case, the clues quickly start piling up and they’re blindingly obvious to anyone who looks.”

Singal spent significant time in the Kotaku in Action and GamerGhazi subreddits, which are pro- and anti-GamerGate hangouts respectively. That experience was helpful to understand the people involved, he said. “GamerGaters are human beings with their own concerns and drives and motivations, so simply reaching out to them inevitably leads to at least a few reasonable ones to email you, which can be quite helpful. It’s a fascinating experiment in 2015 journalism.”

The second journalist I exchanged emails with is Erik Kain, a popular writer with Forbes who covers video games and pop culture. While doing research for this article I asked both supporters and detractors of GamerGate who they felt wrote about the controversy from the most neutral perspective. Erik Kain was the only writer to be listed by both sides of the controversy, though it was only a couple of people on the anti-GamerGate who cited him. He is far more liked on the pro-GamerGate side.

“I wrote from my own perspective and I attempted to see both sides of the issue without rushing to judgment – something I still do,” he wrote. “This strikes me as less ‘neutral’ and more balanced or objective. Taking a balanced, sober approach has won me both the distinction of ‘neutral’ and various less kind words. But I think I’m just writing my own opinion based on the facts as I see them.”

I asked the two writers about their methodology for covering GamerGate.

Singal wrote back, “You start by taking their claim at face value: they are about ethics in gaming journalism. Okay! So how would an entity that’s concerned with ethics in gaming journalism act?”

He outlined a three-step process he used to arrive to his conclusions.

“First, adopt the hypothesis that GamerGate is about X, where X is simply some issue or stance. Second, go to a GamerGate hangout like KiA and poke around. Third, ask yourself: would a reasonable, fair-minded observer agree that, say, 90% of self-proclaimed GamerGaters seem preoccupied with X?”

He says that neither “ethics in gaming journalism” nor “harassment” are good fits to describe GamerGate. Rather, in his view what fits for X is “GamerGate is about fighting back against progressives and feminists who, in the eyes of GamerGaters, are turning gaming into a politically correct freakshow.”

Kain’s methodology was a little different. After watching some of the YouTube videos when GamerGate was erupting, “I reached out to Quinn and others like Brianna Wu, but none of them replied,” he wrote. “I honestly found many of the conspiracies brought up by GamerGate to be a bit breathless and over-the-top, but no more so than the accusations thrown their way by detractors. So I just tried to read as much as I could and sift through it all, and then analyze what I found. I talked with GamerGate supporters on Twitter, had discussions with other game journalists and people in the industry. I mostly just tried to focus on what I saw as the important issues, and not make the discussion either about harassment or conspiracy theories. My approach was to steer the conversation toward the middle, and away from reactionaries on both sides.”

When I was interviewing GamerGate for my previous article, I found several mentioning a strong desire for media to separate news from opinion and to clearly distinguish between the two. I talked with Oliver Campbell, a writer and prominent supporter of GamerGate.

“One of the things that make this topic a rather big deal is when the public can’t separate facts from opinions,” he said. “People are making decisions based on subjective points of view as opposed to verified truths.” He concluded, “I don’t agree with the assessment that everyone can tell the difference between the two.”

I also spoke with Michael Koretzky on the Super Podcast Action Committee show about his thoughts on the separation of news from opinion.

“It’s up to the public,” he argued. “If they decide that journalism can be more blended, I’ll do that stuff. But right now that’s not what I hear from the members of the public I talk to in any particular audience. I have yet to see an audience… that says, ‘you know what don’t give me the news just kind of mix it with your opinion really subtly and I’ll just really eat that shit up,‘” he said in his usual colorful way.

James Fudge, Managing Editor of GamePolitics agreed. “I don’t care what other sites do but I don’t think you should blend the two. You should do one or the other and they should be marked.”

Jesse Singal disagrees, and argues that such a distinction is an antiquated notion from the old newspaper days. “Reported opinion pieces have exploded in popularity since the early days of blogging, and this is now a far more common style than ‘straight’ news writing,” he wrote. “Both Koretzky and GamerGate are approaching this from a weirdly old-fashioned perspective, I think.”

Erik Kain added, “There’s a time and place for each style. I could just post the new Call of Duty trailer, or I could post it, give readers some information about it, and write a bit about what I think about it all at the same time. Discerning readers – and yes, readers have a responsibility to do their homework – should be able to tell the difference without having to hold their hands. At the same time, news outlets shouldn’t disguise opinion as news either.”

I asked Owen Good why we don’t see more straight news coverage of GamerGate.

“I think the absence of straight news coverage is indicative of a couple things. The first is people who would be inclined to play it down the middle see what a headache this is and go, ‘fuck it, it’s not worth that, not when I can write a post about Destiny and get twelve times the audience and one tenth the aggravation.’ On another level, the ones who choose to deal with the topic are going to be the most opinionated about it. Lines are drawn. If you’re not with us, you’re against us.”

Good went on to criticize the media in general. “What I see a lot of now that I’m writing online, and this is not specific to any publication or any subject, but I see writers who are increasingly disconnected from their readership. It could be the publishing model, but I see a lot of people writing for themselves or their colleagues or their friends,” he said. “One thing about writing for physical media is you can be more directly called into account when you fail the readership, and on one level that is what GamerGate is about. When you divorce [writers] from writing for other people then it comes off as lecturing.”

I asked both Erik Kain and Jesse Singal their opinions on Owen Good’s article.

“I think it was very fair,” wrote Kain.

“Yeah, it’s just hard in a straight news article to sum up the movement in a way that won’t lead to someone yelling at you,” wrote Singal. “I probably would have phrased the [backlash] sentence a little bit differently, but it’s written in the careful way of someone trying to be ‘fair’.”

Erik Kain agreed. “Straight news on GamerGate is hard, because no matter what you say, somebody will be offended.”

GamerGate has now reached its one year mark and it has become no easier for journalists to cover. People embroiled within the controversy whom I have deemed “point counters” often hang on tiny details within articles to see if they benefit or harm their side of the issue.

Owen Good agreed. “Threading the needle on anything to do with GamerGate is very, very difficult. There are two sides out there who want you to score card everything that you publish. It’s a very tough window to slide through.”

“It is extraordinarily difficult explaining to people what this controversy is about,” concluded Good. “Why it raises such anger, why it creates such stress. At the end of the day they’re not even talking about the entertainment product. They’re talking about how people write about the entertainment product. And that’s a very hard thing to get across. It’s a really difficult thing for people to understand how it created so much anger.”

But those point counters are not going away, and journalists covering GamerGate have to be aware that this is not only difficult to describe this complex movement, but recognize that no matter the style you use or position you take, it is a near certainty that you will receive hostile feedback.

Thick skin is required.

Note: I retained publishing rights to all my articles published on GamePolitics.com. This article did go through the full GamePolitics editorial process. Thank you to James Fudge and Andrew Eisen for their work on that late, great website and their help with my foray into national publishing!