How not to suck at game journalism

As a follow-up to his piece on why game journalism sucks, which is itself very reminiscent of a feature from the website two months prior, GameDaily's Chris Buffa offers some suggestions as to how one can improve their journalistic skills:

1. Become an avid reader
2. Take measures to improve your writing
3. Know your audience
4. Embrace creativity
5. Research everything
6. Establish excellent business relationships with PR
7. Check your ego at the door
8. Keep flirting to a minimum
9. Do not allow friendships and free stuff to affect your editorial

Less than 10, which is definitely a step in the right direction. People tend to have short attention spans, too many steps would make their heads hurt. In fact, I'm willing to bet we can shrink this list even more:part of improving your writing is reading and taking creative risks. Researching is both a facet of better writing and of communication with PR folk. While we are at it, minimizing flirting and other ego-centric issues are part of good PR relations. We can eliminate a few more points, leaving us with a smaller list:

1. Take measures to improve your writing
2. Know your audience
3. Establish excellent business relationships with PR
4. Do not allow friendships and free stuff affect your editorial

Since writing is based on your audience, knowing who you write for is just another part of improving your writing. And the last two commandments seem a bit wordy, and who can remember verbose advice? Let's simplify even further:

1. Take measures to improve your writing
2. Don't be an ass (unless warranted)
3. Don't be biased

On second thought, it doesn't really matter if you are an ass. Let's just throw that one away -- the less we have to remember, the better:

1. Learn to write
2. Be honest.
   

Actually, I think we can shrink this down further:

1. Don't suck.

There we go, much better ...

[Inspired by (but pales in comparison to) George Carlin]