Well, one more thing you stealth-commented while I was still writing:

But the more I think about it in terms of institutional goals, the more I think you were right about one thing to begin with: there is such a thing as “the enthusiast press,” which, at least in the case of, say, Kotaku, IGN, UGO has “maximize ad revenue” as an institutional goal. They’re never going to set up rules that interfere with that. No writer working in that environment is going to be able to do their best work, period. We need better institutions, I think.

Of course, since “enthusiasts,” or whatever you want to call them really, really love to be told that the games they like are THE AWESOME and will put up with being told that Beowulf is the best movie of 2007, we’re not going to get those institutions, because not enough people want them.

I'm not sure you meant the same thing with "enthusiast press" as I do. I'm not being even remotely dismissive, for one thing. It's not the difference between, say, Fangoria and Variety; it's the difference between The New York Times and EDGE or Joystiq. I don't think that it's baked into the notion of "enthusiast press" that they all have to work like Kotaku, UGO, and IGN, because I don't think it has much of anything to do with the business model. I think it's solely about the material they cover. Again: part of it is investigative journalism about the industry as a whole, but a lot of it is writing about the arts, topics that are inherently subjective and inherently inconsequential.

And I think it's defeatist to assume that there's no demand for intelligent and insightful coverage of an ultimately inconsequential topic. Every print magazine has been hit hard over the past few years, but I've still never gotten the impression that EDGE is in danger of going out of business. And they have a reputation — a reputation I'm not entirely convinced is deserved, but whatever — for ignoring the 7-9 scale, and reviewing games critically. They don't get the readership numbers of Kotaku, I'm sure, but that doesn't mean there's no demand for it at all.