Chris was on a panel about "Influencer Journalists" and you can watch it (Patreon)

The video starts at 3:35, by the way!

Hello everyone.I thought you might get a kick out of watching a discussion I was a part of earlier this week at The Frontline Club in London. If you've not heard of The Frontline Club before (and I'll be honest, I hadn't prior to being invited to speak), it's a members club for journalists and photographers which hosts events like the one above in order to provide a space for people working in the media to come together and discuss their work.

It was also founded by a pair of surviving members of Frontline Television News, a group of war photographers and video journalists, many of whom died while in the service of documenting conflict around the world. As a result, the club is filled with artifacts collected by war correspondents out in the field, while the walls are adorned with first prints of photographs from some of the most significant moments ever captured during warfare. Julian Assange once stayed here for two months while fighting extradition from the United Kingdom.

I bring all of this up to paint a picture of just how unusual it felt to be on stage at a place like this, talking about People Make Games and the journalism we publish.The panel was made up of myself, Tom Nicholas (also off of YouTube & I suspect there's some crossover in our audiences!), Mimi Yates and Sophie Peachey. The latter two create short-form video journalism for The Daily Mail and The Times, respectively, which if you're not from the UK... they're both national newspapers and well, not exactly at the top of the pile of British publications you'd ever find me reading. The Mail, in particular, has played a hugely significant role in whipping up the hatred and division afflicting the country today, especially on topics relating to immigration or social equality. So please don't misread my participation in this panel as an endorsement of those two publications. I should say that I don't know enough about Mimi and Sophie's individual work, although some of it looks really worthwhile, but their employers and those that own them are no friend of the British public.Anyway, the panel itself is centered around the topic of "influencer journalism" and the rise of reporters making platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Substack or Instagram a home for their work while growing personal followings in the process. Now I have some pretty major complaints with the word influencer itself and that comes up in our conversation early on, but whatever we want to call this space, it's an increasingly important part of the way in which we all ingest news, commentary and even, dare I say it, investigative reporting.To quote the Frontline Club's own description of the event: "Can creator-led journalism strengthen and democratise the profession, or will the incentives of social platforms risk rewarding opinion, outrage and personal branding over editorial rigour? "And let me tell you, I think about this question ALL of the time. If anything, you'll hear me come down a little hard on this new form of journalism, one that we ourselves are a part of, because I feel a deep responsibility to be aware of its various pitfalls and the huge responsibility that comes with speaking to an audience like the one we've been able to build.

Hopefully you enjoy the panel as much as I did and although I seem to remember being relatively switched on the entire time, I was very jet-lagged following my most recent trip over to visit the Blizzard unions in California, so please forgive any meandering answers on my part.