Apologies for not posting this yesterday. I was quite violently ill, a fact that impeded my ability to attend a job interview. GamrFeed’s official Twitter account, which is apparently operated by Andy “GamingForever1” Garner, decided to take a cheap shot at me about that, by the way, which just goes to show how unprofessional they’ve been regarding these accusations. They’ve since deleted the tweet, and I didn’t take a screengrab, but fortunately a handful of people did an old-school retweet.

Anyway, on to the first post of the day, which is actually supposed to have been yesterday’s post. A handful of former VGChartz GamrFeed writers have been in touch with me since Monday to tell their own stories of their time at the website. So here they are.

The first entry comes from former contributing writer, Jeanine Celestin:

I only worked at VGChartz for a short time - a couple of weeks, in fact. The Editor-in-Chief Chris Arnone was eager to get me on as soon as I applied, and pay was only glossed over through emails. So I began writing. Soon after I started I began to notice a lot of the comments I was receiving from readers on my posts were negative in nature, for no apparent reason. I’m used to the Internet, but it was pretty obvious the fanbase seemed disgruntled.

I began hearing rumors that Chris was taking money for reviews, and it was pretty obvious that he was taking the best and most popular reviews for himself without even asking if anyone else wanted to cover them. I also noticed that at least one of the other writers was of low writing caliber, with mistakes and brief articles that seemed copy-pasted, yet Chris never seemed to say anything to him about it. I later learned they were close friends. I eventually got my paycheck and it was pretty low despite the minimum of 20 articles a week I was expected to put out. I asked how pay was figured out and Chris evaded my questions (which wasn’t unusual, he seemed to blow people off a lot). A friend of mine also wrote for the site, and Chris avoided his questions as well - my friend hadn’t even been paid after more than a month, even though he worked harder than anyone.

I got a bad feeling about the whole thing, and it wasn’t worth failing my college courses for a website with no journalistic integrity, so I quit. VGChartz is, as near I can tell, a website that has no integrity and treats their writers not much better than slaves, and pays a wage not much above that. Unfortunately they appear to be the rule rather than the exception in the world of gaming journalism.

Our next entry comes from former VGChartz writer Evan Elden Eller who, following reductions in pay and sudden changes in editorial policy, decided it wasn’t worth sticking around anymore:

I was a writer at VGChartz from May 2009 until December 2010.  I joined the team as a Contributing Editor in May 2009 for free, was promoted to News Editor in July 2010, promoted to Senior Editor in September 2010, and then demoted to Senior Writer in December 2010, at which point I stopped writing for the site.  They were already 2 months behind on my meager blogging salary anyway.  Again.

Anyway, this was the email (attached below) that surprised us all:

Hey all

I want to make you all aware of a major change to our staff structure that will be starting unofficially tomorrow and will officially begin on Monday.

Chris Arnone will be taking on the role of Editor-in-Chief for gamrFeed and gamrReview. This is a full-time position and Chris will be responsible for all areas of brand development, staff management, editorial content, editing, press and publisher contact and event attendance as well as increasing his writing output significantly. This echoes the new direction I want to take the business in - fewer people but each taking on larger (better paid, permanent) roles. Rather than 20-30 people writing a couple of pieces each per week, I want to get to the situation where we have 3-4 writing 50 per week (applies to gamrFeed but also similar principles eventually for gamrReview as well).

This will obviously affect everyone in different ways. Nick S and Evan - as Chris will be handling all approvals from now on, your roles will revert to ones of senior writers - paid per article but with the opportunity to become one of the new fixed-pay staff that we are looking to appoint in the coming months. Brian - Chris will obviously be taking on all press / pr work from now on, and given your recent withdrawal from the site we can obviously have a seperate conversation about your future with VGChartz - you have done a huge amount to get us where we are now so I’m keen not to lose you from the team

As for reviews, myself and Chris agree that things run pretty smoothly at the moment as they are. Chris doesn’t intend to have much input in the day-to-day management of the review team (Nick, Karl and Craig do a fine job as it is), but will be taking on the brand development for gamrReview and the press / publisher relations side of things to ensure that from this point on we can cover all major reviews before release.

Please let myself or Chris know if you have any questions and please congratulate Chris on his new role and let your teams know about the changes. There will be an official announcement on Monday.

Thanks
Brett 

I already knew that Nick had been screwed out of money for going to PAX, and that he’d been tricked into moving to Los Angeles for no reason, so I had already stopped trusting the management, which was a little weird.  But I was still playing dumb and working really hard because I’d been promoted twice since E3 in June and the work still seemed promising.  Then this email came, and I’d never had anybody at the site give me any concern or complaint about my work, so I was really surprised, confused, and angry.  I felt like they were saying, “Oh it’s not that your work is bad, it’s just that we don’t care about it or want to pay for it.”

…I wrote 4 more articles over the next 3 days, told them I’d be taking a vacation for “a couple of weeks,” but didn’t come back.  I assumed I would’ve been fired when I disappeared, but I didn’t get fired until January.

I probably should’ve just said “No thanks, I quit,” and been done with it, but I thought I’d take a little break and come back.  But during that break I changed my mind.  I just couldn’t write there anymore, knowing that they weren’t paying Nick what they’d agreed to in a written contract, and knowing that I could get promoted twice and demoted once in half a year without getting any criticism the whole time.  And at this point most of my work was editing, which was completely invisible.  They mostly hired people who couldn’t self-edit, either due to ESL grammar issues (we had a pretty diverse international team), or due to being 13 (yes we had a 13 year old writer for some reason), or just not being that swell or experienced of a writer.  So my job was to clean up all their writing, and occasionally delete their mistakes or accidental year-old news.  But editing doesn’t increase page views, so they realized they didn’t need to pay me.  Visitors can’t take their page views back due to horrible grammar.  They could just have sloppy articles getting the same amount of hits.  I guess this is the same thing that happened to Jackmovich later on.  They gave him a promotion about editing, but then were angry that he spent so much time editing instead of writing.  But I don’t know; that’s just conjecture.  It seemed like that’s what happened to me though.

After all that, I was still getting IMs from people on the team, asking for my help editing/approving/posting news.  Because Chris couldn’t be found by his own team.  So I’d say, “I actually just got fired by Chris, you should find him and ask him for help.  He’s the only one who can help you with that now.”  And every time, they’d say, “You got fired?  Why?  That doesn’t make any sense.”

Even though Chris was the manager, I was the one who wrote the posting FAQ for new team members, since I was tired of teaching each new member of the team how to use our system, which was Chris’s job.  And I included the Pro Tip about gameJournos.  I think it’s cute that they left that up there this long and somebody else already gave you the screenshot.

Basically, I tried to leave on the friendliest of terms possible, and sent friendly farewell/thanks emails to both Brett and Chris, and went on my way.  But I can’t let them slander Jackmovich and say he wasn’t fulfilling his duties.  He was probably the hardest working person at that site, and the only one who knew anything about ethics in journalism.  Everybody else was there because video games are so cool, myself included.

And when it comes to the Reddit thing, yeah, GamingForever1 [Andy Garner] had been Digging and Redditing our news for as long as I remember, and everybody knew about it.  I didn’t realize he had so many accounts though.  Personally, I only ever had one account at Reddit, and it got banned from the gaming section as soon as I tried Redditing my own posts.

And finally, we have an account from a VGChartz writer who wishes to remain anonymous:

When Chris first brought me onto the team, he was cool and helpful at first. Then he vanished. He was never around to talk to and he never responded to emails. That was his trademark. I had to rely on other writers to help me get my job done.

When Chris did communicate, he was condescending and didn’t want to listen to any of my input. I never knew how my pay worked - I asked Chris several times how I would be paid, and what the rate of pay was. He never gave me a straight answer.

When I was finally paid I received far less than I expected despite contributing regularly to the site. I was really unhappy with the pay I received considering the amount of work I put in.

Iffy payment policies, poor communication skills, inconsistent editorial policy… this is all starting to sound very familiar, doesn’t it? That’s five writers - Joseph, Nick, Jeanine, Evan, and our anonymous contributor - making the same claim.

Tomorrow (and obviously by “tomorrow” I mean “in an hour or so”) we’ll have the thrilling conclusion of our week of VGChartz posts. Then we’ll have Saturday to look forward to.