Several weeks ago, Joseph Jackmovich came to me with concerns about ethic violations going on at VGChartz, the site he’d served on as a Weekend Editor for some time. We’d discussed the best way of disseminating this vital information, culminating in the blog post on Monday, the first in a planned week-long series of posts.

However rather than attempt to defend his site against the allegations, VGChartz’ proprietor Brett Walton focused his energies on making Joseph and myself look, to use Brett’s own words, arrogant and idiotic, and posted several inaccurate statements about the nature of Joseph’s employment with the site, specifically that he hadn’t been “fulfilling his duties” and that he had been fired because of it.

One of Jackmovich’s colleagues, Alex Co, said of him, “I’m 110% positive that Joe helped me more than anyone else during my time at VGChartz. I’d stake my reputation on it.” That doesn’t sound like someone who wasn’t “fulfilling his duties.”

Brett has has since written a lengthy post defending his site against the allegations that, as you will soon learn, is littered with factual inaccuracies.

I had planned to post a detailed breakdown of what happened following the Reddit scandal that broke back in March (the shortened version: Andy Garner, aka “GamingForever1”, still works for VGChartz, they had a pretty good idea of what he was up to, and he’s still doing it). However in light of Brett’s response I’ve decided instead that it would be best to speak directly to Joe about his time at VGChartz, what happened while he was there, and why he left.

What follows is a transcript of our talk. It’s not a quick read, by any means, but it’s worth sitting down to read. It’s also worth noting that much of what Joseph says it backed up with actual hard evidence. Which is nice.

I’ve made the email conversations between Joseph and Chris & Brett available for download, and there’s a link to that further into the post, but if you’re in a hurry you can snag those from here.

What was the nature of your relationship with VGChartz?

I wrote there. I had three separate positions. First I was a writer, then I was Weekend Editor, then finally Senior Editor. That was my final position there. Each one had a separate set of job duties and pay associated with it.

How long were you there for?

About a year. I want to say it was almost a year to the date. I’m pretty sure it was July 2010 to July 2011.

What did your job entail?

The first job, the writing, was just writing. There was nothing special to it. It was just producing content – news, features, editorials, whatever. Really the only stuff that got looked over before it was published was editorial stuff, but it was pretty much a post-what-you-want type thing, as long as you were within somewhat-professional parameters. I was paid on hits.

Weekend Editing dealt with, as Chris [Arnone, VGChartz Editor-in-Chief] told me in an email, anything that was posted on the weekends, that I was responsible for approving and editing all that stuff. It was basically an on-call position.

You weren’t kept to any specific hours as Weekend Editor?

No. What I generally did was I’d check the site probably about every half-hour on my phone to make sure there wasn’t anything pending, and if there was then I’d go and edit it. I kept weird hours though, so I think that probably made it look like I wasn’t doing anything to some people. I know Brett said that there were pending articles sitting for hours sometimes, and that’s because I’m a real night owl. I generally went to bed  around 8 or 9 in the morning and got up at 3 or 5 in the afternoon [-0500 GMT].

So, as VGChartz is based in the UK, you would have been getting up somewhere between 11 o’ clock at night and 1 o’ clock in the morning UK time, and working through the morning probably until the early afternoon.

They’re not ideal working hours for the US, I know, but [VGChartz] have writers in Europe. There’s a kid in Greece that was working for us, and there was also [VGChartz contributor Alex Co] who was in the Philippines. He was always up when I was up, and he was writing a lot, so that helped.

There was Jared. Jared Presler lived in the US… A lot of his stories tended to wait until I got up, but that was usually the first thing I did. I’d get up and I’d go straight to those stories. And it’s not a terribly time-consuming amount of work. Depending on how bad the story was, about a half-hour to make sure everything’s good on a story before I put my stamp on it.

It was essentially total site control over the weekend. That was a flat $300 a month, but there was also a ten article per-week quota that was attached to that.

You were also a Senior Editor for a while.

That’s the one I’m foggiest on, which was strange because that was the most recent one, but it was also the quickest one. What happened was [Nick] Simberg needed to get brought in for editing because editing during the week was just virtually non-existent. I mean, there were at least two separate occasions where I emailed Chris [Arnone], and Nick emailed Chris, where every single story on the front page had some kind of error on it, y’know? And they might have been minor errors, but you could still go through every single story on the front page and there’d be a copy error at the very least. So there was a need for an editor during the week, especially at night when Chris wasn’t available, because he was, I think, set from 9 to 5 eastern time in America. I think he was on later but that was pretty much his [set] time.

Me and Nick began Senior Editing. It was interesting, because I got $300 a month for the weekend editing, and then it was $150 a month for the Senior Editing, which was essentially just splitting my salary between me and Nick. We also had a pay per-view thing with the articles where we’d write so much and get paid on our [pageviews], but I don’t think there’s a quota associated with that. So what I did, because I was kind-of getting disillusioned with the site at that point, was I basically just stuck with editing and I didn’t really produce much content. I figured that was okay since my pay was broken into two halves – production and editing.

Were you given any specific targets, quotas or goals that you had to reach as part of the position?

As Senior Editor, I don’t think so. I don’t have any emails about that… I’m pretty sure it was an over-the-phone or an [AOL Instant Messenger] thing, so I don’t have any transcripts of it. I don’t think I got anything about the Senior Editor position. I don’t think, I mean, there might have been an assumption that I had to produce the material, and I don’t think that’s too far out of the question, to expect some material. But considering that my pay was just cut in half, I was happy with just editing. Also considering that about that time when I took the position I was getting ready to go out of the country for almost a month [for school], so that was kind-of an issue too.

Did you give Brett Walton or Chris Arnone any advance notice that you’d be leaving the country for a month?

I don’t think [I gave notice to] Brett, because I never really spoke to him. We only spoke a few times when I first started, and after I wrote a big article about Medal of Honor. But I know I told Chris several times well in advance. The only solid evidence I have of that is an email I sent May 10th saying that my trip was starting May 20th and I’d be out of the country until June 12th. The class was going to end officially June 15th, but I’d always have internet access while I was there, so he could contact me by AIM or email. I told him that I’d essentially be on UK time… I think Kenya is an hour ahead of the UK. I was free to be emailed. Our internet connection was spotty but we always had access at least once a day where we could be emailed for stuff.

Can you go into the specific details about the nature of  your payment with VGChartz? I know you said that your editing pay was separate from your per-pageview pay. I was wondering if you could go into more detail about that.

It was different depending on each position. The writing [job] was what I thought was about 75¢ for 1,000 views. And that wasn’t unique views. They changed that later. That was just total pageviews, I guess, which wasn’t entirely accurate, but that’s what I always assumed I was being paid, was  75¢ per 1,000 for the writing stuff.

Weekend editing was a flat $300 a month, which was everything on the weekends, y’know, 24/7 on the weekends. I always considered that my weekends start at 5:01 on Friday, and then it ended at 11:59 on Sunday. Anything that posted in there, because I figured that Chris would be around before 5 on Friday, and anything that got posted Monday after midnight – well, I mean, sometimes I stretched out, but generally I left it if it got posted at midnight.

But that was a flat $300 a month along with ten articles a week, which, y’know, I can’t honestly tell you if I did that or not. I know I tried, but I probably didn’t make that because I was also doing my full graduate load at the time, but I did make that known before I took the position, that I was very concerned about quotas because of my classes.

[The Senior Editor pay] was two different pay branches. It was a flat $150 a month for editing, and then it was also a pay per-pageview per article, but it wasn’t normal pay per-view like it was before. It was based on uniques and not normal hits. They changed that shortly thereafter. It doesn’t really matter, because I didn’t really write that much at that point. I’d pretty much stopped writing when I was Senior Editing because I was kinda pissed about the pay cut.

Did Brett or Chris raise that issue with you when you brought it to them, that you were concerned about quotas because you were…

Chris said quotas were all on him and that we could work with it, depending on what we worked, and so we kind of agreed on ten. Originally, I think, it was going to be twenty, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to do that. So we kind-of negotiated down to ten. I really didn’t hear anything after that. I was more concerned with making sure what people were writing on the weekends was accurate rather than producing content myself, to be honest.

Was that ten-article quota set when you first took the Weekend Editor position?

For the Weekend Editor, yeah.

How long were you contributing to VGChartz overall?

It was about a year. The Weekend Editing thing was a few months, and the Senior Editing thing was probably less than one [month] of actual time there. Although I never actually invoiced for any of my pay for the Senior Editing. My last pay was for my last month of Weekend Editing. I was lucky to get my weekend pay, I thought. I think there might have been two weeks before I left for Kenya and then, like, a week afterwards when I got back for Senior Editing, which would have been, I don’t know, $100. $80. I didn’t even worry about it.

You say that you were “lucky” to get your final pay as Weekend Editor. Can you clarify that?

The pay was very late. I invoiced it May 15th and I got paid June 16th. The reason [it eventually got paid] is because I sent an email to Chris saying, essentially, “What’s the deal with this pay being late? I don’t think it’s too much to ask for pay being on time. All the stuff that the staff does, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that when you get an invoice you pay it out in a reasonable amount of time.” Within a few hours I got my pay that I was asking for, with narry a response as to why there was a delay.

I’d come to find out a couple of weeks later, when I did quit, that Brett said that he was withholding my pay because he was displeased with my performance and he wanted to talk with me about it first. Which might be afoul of some labor issues, but that’s neither here nor there, I guess.

Brett has made the claim that you weren’t performing to your requirements towards the end of your time as a Weekend Editor, which is why he withheld your pay. His argument is that you wrren’t fulfilling your duties. Can you elaborate on that? Can you give me your take on those events?

The reason why I kinda went for the Senior Editing thing to begin with was [Nick] Simberg had come to me and he wanted to step up his editing, and also help get a little bit of extra money in his pocket. I figured we could both share the editing because we’d worth well together before. I figured we’d be able to do that. I mean, I figured there’d be a pay cut involved, but I had money from a fellowship that I was getting for graduate school, so I was okay.

When I stepped down it wasn’t because I was doing poorly, it was because we were going to split the site up, so there wasn’t any sense in having a Weekend Editor or a Night Editor. I guess, actually, there was a choice. It could either have been that Nick would have been Night Editor or Weekend Editor, and then I would have taken the other position, or we could have both been Senior Editors and just split everything, and then figure it out ourselves. So I opted for that decision. The reason why the position changed wasn’t a production issue at all. At least I didn’t hear about that until I actually quit later.

I know where he keeps saying that the articles sat for a while. I had a group AIM discussion, and that’s where Chris [Arnone] actually told me about the Gillette payment-for-stories thing, or the payment-for-prior-restraint, I guess I should say. When I got back from that I asked him, I was like, “[Are] there any problems you’re seeing with my Weekend Editing?” And they’re like, “Yeah, we’re seeing stories sit for a long time in the afternoon.” I was like, “Yeah, I’m asleep. So, I’m sorry. That’s when my schedule is.” They didn’t say, “Alter your schedule, alter your sleep schedule and try to get up early,” or anything like that.

What was their response, if any?

It just kind-of got brushed aside. Y’know, I told him, “I go to bed at 8 in the morning, so if you notice there aren’t stories sitting for hours at a time from midnight to 8am.” There’s going to be stories sitting regardless because people are writing all the time. It’s just when those stories are sitting, is the point. And I always spaced them out, anyway. I think I did two-hour spacings on the weekends… I didn’t just dump them all out at once.

I moved from Weekend Editor to Senior Editor, sharing that position with Simberg. We were responsible for anything that was posted outside of the Monday-thru-Friday 9-to-5. That was when the pay was separate, between content production and editing, and so I said in an email that, due to the pay cut, there’s no way I’m gonna be producing an extra 100 articles to make up that $150, so I’m pretty much just going to be editing. So I made that clear up front.

I asked if they wanted me to do before-and-afters of articles, so I’d copy and paste the article before and after so they actually have, like, transcripts of my work. We had an issue with another editor in the past where he did a lot of stuff for the site, and he got burned out, and no one saw that he was working. I mean, that’s what a good editor does. It looks like they’re never there… He did an excellent job, and it was kind-of the same thing. I focused on editing.

Honestly, I was getting disillusioned with the site at that point anyway. It’d taken so long for pay, and then with the pay cuts, and then there was another email that was declaring the official switch that was going to remove our flat Editor pay completely. So, essentially, we’d just get a higher pay per-view rate than the writers, but that still wouldn’t take editing into consideration. So we’d get paid more for writing, but it wouldn’t actually pay us for editing. Because before, it was separate. We’d get paid for editing as a flat rate and then content production on a performance rate. And what they thought it would be okay [to do] was just increasing a performance rate and making that cover the previous flat rate. That was when I was like, “You know what? I’m done. I’ve had enough pay cuts, I think I’m just gonna go somewhere else.”

What were the exact circumstances of your departure from VGChartz? How did that go down?

I mean, essentially, that. First he had the pay cut from Weekend to Senior Editor, which I was expecting because that was kind-of the idea. I was trying to help Simberg out and Simberg wanted to take up more responsibility too so he could, y’know, earn a bit more loot and do some work for the site. Because, I mean, he liked the site too. He cared for it. I mean, he put a lot of work into it. He moved for the site. There’s no doubting that he wanted to help.

So there was that original pay cut which was essentially in half, and then there was the elimination of that $150 a month to $0, and then just an enhanced performance rate over the regular writers. That was pretty much what the last straw was. I was gonna quit if I didn’t get the $300, my last [Weekend Editor] pay from them. I mean, that’s what the email [to Chris Arnone] was. “Pay me or I’m gonna leave.” I got that pay, so I stuck around. Then they cut the pay again, and I was like, “Y’know what? I’m good.” And I quit.

Joseph’s email conversations with Brett Walton and Chris Arnone concerning his decision to leave the site can be downloaded from here.

Is there anything else you feel should be mentioned? Anything we haven’t gone over yet?

When I quit… Brett emailed me a few times. I hadn’t really spoken with him since I was asking that they think of not doing the advertorial stuff, and try to consider that if someone’s paying you to mention a game per the FTC endorsement and sponsorship guidelines then you have to mention it. I was just saying shit like that. If someone’s paying you to say something then you gotta mention it. Nothing big, just a little bit in the bottom of the post like, y’know, “We have this.” I used to do reviews for my blog at the regional newspaper, the South Bend Tribune. They required that if I got a review copy for a game that I posted that at the bottom. “A review copy was provided by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.” Y’know, disclosure, just so people know that I didn’t pay for it. It was given to me, so that could influence me. So readers know.

So Brett emailed me and he, I mean, he took offense to the reasons why I left. There are a couple of other things that were bothering me. This one writer, Alex, produced an incredible amount of content for the site. In one month he wrote as much as I did in nine months, and I felt like he got kinda gypped on his pay. There was one staff member there that was doing, I guess, their public relations that was getting $500 a month, and I felt that was also unfair. I brought that up when he emailed me. It was basically just kind of, I don’t know, I felt like he wrote the original email just to get the last word in. I didn’t think I’d hear from any of them when I said I quit. I figured Chris would say, “Sorry to hear that.” Which he did. Brett just wanted to make himself feel okay about it. He’s been acting really pointed with [these posts on GameJournos]. I’ve been trying to keep this whole deal professional.

You can act unethically and not be an unethical person. I think that’s a big differential here… there’s professional and there’s personal, and I’m trying to keep this in the professional realm, but I’m seeing posts by him calling people idiots and stuff, and that’s not good. You can’t say that I was fired because I didn’t work because that’s, y’know, untrue. You can’t just say that you fired someone because they weren’t doing their job when that wasn’t the case. It was never brought up, my lack of productivity was never actually brought to my attention. I suspect that the reason the pay was delayed was just the same reason everybody else’s was, which was either they wanted to collect more interest on the account by not paying it, or they just didn’t give a shit and just wanted to put it off as long as they could.

Brett’s final email to me [after I’d quit] was saying one of my more controversial articles did more harm than good and that I was more trouble than I was worth, that I didn’t do my job. It was just petulant, it what it came off to be like. I mean, I’d already quit. What does it matter? If these are issues, you should have brought it up beforehand… If you’re going to complain about productivity you should probably do it before I say I’m done. If I wasn’t doing my job then why does it matter now? It just came off as petulant.

Chris, to his credit, sent me a nice final email saying that he doesn’t necessarily agree with everything Brett does. He knows that I can do better stuff and that I was bound for better things. He says, y’know, he wants to be a novelist, he knows that I can be a better writer somewhere else. I appreciated that, and I was gonna email him back but I was just kind of cashed out with the site. I should have emailed him back and thanked him for the sentiment. It was weird, man. He might have never communicated with folks, and he never really acted like he liked me. On the phone he was an alright dude, but he never made an effort to reach out and it always just seemed like he really just disliked me, so there was always a real tension there whenever we tried to communicate. The decisions he’s making, some of them are unethical too, but I’m not saying that he’s an unethical person. He’s making unethical decisions. I mean, just because you act in a way doesn’t mean that you are that thing intrinsically.

It’s very easy to think that you’re doing what you think is right, and what you think is the right choice…

Yeah. Or even if you’re doing something that you think is wrong, just rationalizing it in a way that makes it okay, and I think that’s probably closer to the truth in this situation.

It was nice that [Chris] sent that last email and I appreciated it, because he said stuff like, “I don’t think your article did more harm than good,” basically just trying to cushion the blows that Brett gave. I mean, what Brett says doesn’t bother me. It still doesn’t. (Laugh)

The fact of the matter is that any respectable place, if you go to them and you say, “Hey, I used to work for a place and I reported them for being unethical,” they’re gonna shake your hand. They’re not gonna say, “Oh, we don’t want this guy here.”

It’s a lot different. If they would have said “This stuff’s off the record” then I can’t say anything about that. If you say it’s off the record, it doesn’t exist. But I never signed a contract there, I never worked officially there, I guess. I got paid for writing, but there’s nothing official there. There’s no proof that there’s a writing relationship at all other than the fact that I invoiced them every so-often and they paid me money every so-often. And there’s articles that I wrote on the site every so-often. There’s a lot of gray area with my actual employment status, which is what [Brett]’s really trying to to rip on now… I didn’t sign anything.