The thing with game journalism is that most of what may be newsworthy to put in a magazine boils down to a race to see who can post a paraphrased press release the fastest. On top of this, game journalism is so homogenized that most publications are indistinguishable if you were to print out their articles without the name of the publication or the writer on the pages.
It's at a point where very, very few magazines or game sites have anything special about them. Most interviews on most sites cover the same topics, previews boil down to paraphrasing fact sheets, hands-ons are largely controlled by the PR people so that we wind up seeing places like Gamespot, IGN, and Gamespy posting impressions of the same game within 24 hours of one another, ultimately saying more or less the same thing, reviews come down to being a race to be posted first so that the article can attract as many people seeking their daily affirmation that the game they hated or loved all through its developement does indeed suck or rock, and there is a huge emphasis on screenshots, while less so on articles right across the board (but this can also be blamed on Western cultures recent lack of interest in reading as well).
I don't know if it is necessarily that game journalism is bad, but that it is all the same. If Gamespot or EGM were to collapse tomorrow, people may be a bit bummed out about it in the short term, but that would just mean that PR firms would allocate information and exclusives that used to go GS or EGM to one of the other publications, resulting in game fans not missing out on anything in the first place. This just shows how crippled most game news outlets are, in that they are so strongly at the mercy of game publishers. It's a catch 22. They may suffer from uninspired same-ness, but if they try and break out of the mould in a meaningful manner, then they may ruffle too many feathers with the PR firms handling the games, forcing mags to stay in their current format.
Sadly (well, frustratingly...for me anyway), it feels like a lot of game journalism outlets have to deal with one of their arms being tied at any one time, just due to politcal BS in dealing with the various publishers. There is the potential for a lot better writing out there, but the subject matter that could hike up the quality of game writing in on sketchy turf that could result in mags dealing with unwanted headaches (ads pulled, no review copies of games, etc).
