Jonathan Holmes is the former editor-in-chief of Destructoid and a frequent contributor to that site as well as many others, including Nintendo Force and A Profound Waste of Time. He is also a voice actor and a frequent speaker and panelist at video game conventions. Next week, he and I will be appearing on the PAX East 2017 panel "+1 to Journalism".
In advance of that event, this week Jonathan and I discuss the spat that YouTube celebrity PewDiePie is having with the Wall Street Journal over his anti-Semitism; the politics of managing a site such as Destructoid; how perception of skin color affects Jonathan’s reception both within his community and by GamerGate; why no journalist wants to write about Nintendo; and how he came to be a voice actor in 2064: Read Only Memories by MidBoss Games.
Stream the audio edition of this interview below or from iTunes, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Spoke, Overcast, Pandora, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive. Click past the jump for links to resources mentioned in this episode.
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Jonathan’s publications
- PewDiePie:
- Disney Severs Ties With YouTube Star PewDiePie After Anti-Semitic Posts (Wall Street Journal)
- Pewdiepie apologizes for offensive jokes, claims media bias against him (Jonathan Holmes for Destructoid)
- PewDiePie Says WSJ Took Anti-Semitic Content Out of Context (Wall Street Journal)
- 2064: Read Only Memories
- Lisa: The Painful RPG
- Jonathan’s PAX East 2017 appearances:
- A Panel Moderated by AI (Friday at 3:30 PM in Condor)
- Going Retro in 2017: The Challenges of Yesterday and Today (Saturday at 12:30 PM in Arachnid)
- Podcasting: From Amateur to Pro-Caster (Saturday at 8 PM in Arachnid)
- +1 to Journalism: Becoming a Better Writer (Sunday at 4 PM in Bobcat)
- Edward F. Gagne on Polygamer
Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:08:28 — 32.2MB) | Embed
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Regarding pewdiepie, where do writers draw the line? It would be a damaging falsehood to claim that you have enough facts to support the opinion that his actions were anti-Semitic. And I don’t think defamation laws care whether you are a journalist or not.