People who write about games (journalists, critics)

A bit of a mess here, lots of forums where people write about games like blogs, more traditional review sites, magazines, newspapers. Also the people who are writing aren't very homogenous. I cannot come up with one person to represent the game critic/journalist, at least not yet.There seem to be tons of people who write as a hobby and not so many who get paid for it.

In the hobby group the ages span from teens to maybe 30 ish (based on user profiles that I viewed at a couple of forums). The younger ones I would think write to maybe get free games and cred from their friends, the older I think might write for the same reasons but they are likely to have matured and are probably the ones who would be more interested in indie games.

The other group is people that are journalists/game critics who get paid to write. They probably work for more established game sites/blogs or magazines that get their revenue from advertisments. Depending on how much funding they have they might have the possibility to visit game awards and exhibitions. They might also write about things concerning the game industry that are not related to a specific game. These people should (but might not) write about things that they think their readers will find interesting.

I don't think it's relevant for us to have the younger hobby writers as our target audience since they are not in sync with our other target user groups. The older hobby writers and the journalists/critics who get paid are more likely to go well or coincide with our other target groups. It feels obvious that the more established game sites get tons of mails from indie developers who want them to write about their games, so it will take some effort to get attention. However, since they are human beings it should be easier if we could establish some kind of personal relation with them. Maybe it would be good to have a brainstorming session about this sometime to see what ideas we can come up with. What would also be interesting to know is which blogs/websites/magazines our other target user groups read. These would of course be the ones we want to get attention from...

I realize that this post is very general and not very useful yet, but I had to start somewhere. I found a quite informative video about Game journalism here for those who are interested http://media.digitaltrends.com/players-only/rewriting-game-journalism/.