I guess I wasn't quite done--one more thing:

"They (and by the sound of it, you) assume that the relationship is just inherently antagonistic, because their primary motivation is to generate ad revenue and the companies’ primary motivation is to generate sales. But my entire point is that for most of the people in the business, the motivation is perfectly aligned: to drum up interest in this topic both sides are enthusiastic about."

And my entire point is that the individual motivation doesn't matter--never matters--when it's not in line with the instutional motivation. So if the journalist and PR guy both want to drum up enthusiasm for a game, and both think it will sell more copies of the game and bring more ad dollars to their site, then everybody's happy. But even if the journalist doesn't want to hurt the game, if his publication is set up to chase ad dollars and they have something that will bring clicks, that's what's going to happen. (And even if the developer thinks that these new screenshots will drum up enthusiasm for the game, if the company doesn't think this will sell more copies, they're not going anywhere.) Which is why it's important to design your institutions very carefully.

Legacy media, bless their hearts, had the idea that their institutional goal was to provide a public service. They built their rules around this goal, then let the ad guys go nuts within those rules. And as long as they made most of their money from subscribers and not advertisers, all was right with the world. You talk a lot about how an individual writer should neither censor themselves nor be reflexively "objective," by which I guess you mean write The View From Nowhere pieces. I say that codes of journalistic ethics are the only way to make this possible (not guarantee it, but make it possible) for writers. If you don't have grounds to fire Harry Knowles, the people you write about will do their best, 24x7, to turn your writers into Harry Knowles. And let's face it, that's what they try to do to games & gadget writers.

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.