Kotaku Loses Another EIC, This Time Because Of Its Writing Demands

Kotaku is down another editor as Jen Glennon resigned today. According to a report on Aftermath, Glennon submitted her resignation saying that the decision to leave was based on management’s “recent decision to deprioritize news in favor of guides”. That may not seem too bad. Gamers love guides after all, but, according to a source Aftermath spoke with, the company wants the writing team to produce 50 guides a week.

Speaking as someone who’s written guides before, that really is a lot. A good guide takes hours to put together. If you take into account the time spent in a game that you may not even have elected to play otherwise in order to figure it out, the compiling of notes and screenshots for the post, and organizing the content, and putting it together into something that’s usable, you’re looking at fifteen to twenty hours for one piece. That’s the getting started kind of stuff that doesn’t require you to be too invested in the game.

Workload aside, that’s not the only reason Glennon reportedly decided to resign. According to the report, the primary reason stated is that the shift just doesn’t make sense as data shows that guides are not what drives traffic at Kotaku. The report quotes portions of the letter addressed to G/O Media executives Jim Spanfeller and Lea Goldman, saying:

”After careful consideration, I have concluded that the current management structure and decision-making process at G/O Media are not aligned with my values and goals for Kotaku.”

”I firmly believe that the decision to ‘invert’ Kotaku’s editorial strategy to deprioritize news in favor of guides is fundamentally misguided given the current infrastructure of the site. [This decision is] directly contradicted by months of traffic data, and shows an astonishing disregard for the livelihoods of the remaining writers and editors who work here.”

Glennon, who was Kotaku’s second editor-in-chief following Stephen Totilo's leaving in 2021 makes a seemingly valid point. Of all of Kotaku’s content we see people sharing, guides are not one of them.