Eight months is a long time. You can get most of a baby out of it, if you play your cards right. True sickos, though, instead choose to devote those precious sands from life’s gargantuan hourglass to journalism. This week we published an eight-months-in-the-making report on Clickout, a secretive company filling video game sites with AI and gambling, by Jack Ryan. On the latest Aftermath Hours, we talk to him about everything that went into it.
Numerous once-revered sites like GamesHub, The Escapist, and Esports Insider have been swept up in Clickout’s net, rendering some of them almost unrecognizable. How is it getting away with this? Why target video game websites, specifically? What does a company get out of burying them in casino links? And why, exactly, is Clickout so secretive?
We also talk to Jack about what goes into reporting out this kind of story when a company has proven more than willing to bare its legal fangs at others in the past. It’s a risky endeavor both for the reporter and a site like ours; the question then becomes, how do we minimize that risk? We answer all those questions and more — and then we choose which video game characters we’d like to preside over us in court, should it come to that.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can secretly purchase dozens of websites and remove AI and gambling from them.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Jack: I don’t want to throw any shade at you guys; I know how this publication works. But for eight months of investigation, you should probably be paid enough to at least pay your rent, right?
Nathan: Definitely.
Jack: And there are no places that can do that. There’s no place that can pay me for eight months of this. Let’s even say that I only did half that time actually working on the story, and I think that’s fair – maybe underestimating depending on what we’re thinking about. But even then, there’s no place that’s gonna pay that money either.
This is not a knock; this is a rallying cry. If you want this kind of work to be done, you have to support this kind of work. You have to support publications that take a risk on this kind of work, like Aftermath.
I think there are some misconceptions about the way that journalism is performed and what it takes to actually do something like this. I wouldn’t say it’s hell; I had a great time working on the story and working with Riley. But there are moments when you’re tearing your hair out about this because you’re stuck in some sort of minutiae over specific lines with the legal team or “Do we leave this out, I don’t want to leave it out because it’s important, oh we have to leave it out.” When you’re going through those motions, that’s what journalism is.
There’s no element of prestige. If I was doing this for the money, I’m an idiot. What’s the point of a thousand retweets? It’s nice that the story’s out there, and people are talking about it. That’s what matters. It matters that people can take that story forward and keep working on it.
The other thing that matters to me is giving that opportunity to other people if I can. I’m quite lucky in some senses because I am a science journalist, and I work in science misconduct reporting that does get into bigger papers and get mainstream coverage in Australia. If I can somehow filter that down and give someone else the opportunity to investigate or work on something, then I’d also like to be able to do that.
Nathan: One thing I wanted to touch on a little more is the legal angle. We live in an era of a lot of people getting their news from content creators. And a lot of content creators shoot from the hip. They’ll either say something off the cuff without having verified it, or they’ll put on their journalist hat and be like “I talked to one source” — which will lead them to be sloppy or incorrect. Especially for this piece, a months-long investigation, what did that legal process look like? How long did that process take? What were the sticking points?
Jack: It’s a great question, and I think it’s so informative for audiences to think about this when they think about investigative work and reading journalism. And like you said, you can have content creators shoot from the hip or have people who, perhaps under the guise of opinion, will just say something that isn’t true, and there are real risks to that. In journalism, I can’t say anything in this piece that I haven’t at least really, really tried to back up and believe to be true.
Just from the process perspective, I printed out [my piece] and made sure that each paragraph had primary documentation behind it myself. But when you take that to a legal team, often what they’re looking for is editorialization — language where you’ve strayed out of an objective truth and into a space that you’re alleging something where perhaps you’re being more forceful about. And so, some of my earlier drafts contained language that was very direct about what a parasite is, very direct about calling something a parasite, when actually legally, we still have to be objective about what Clickout is and what it represents.
I’m not trying to write a story that is “Clickout sucks.” I’m trying to write “Clickout did this” and then let the audience decide what they think about it. The necessity of working with a legal team on an investigation is, they bring you back to a space of “What are the facts here, and how are you conveying that to an audience to let them decide what the situation is?”
This specific piece, I think we went back and forth [with legal] four or five times. And that was also with Riley, who did an amazing job coordinating the efforts between me and the legal team over there in the US — and filtering the responses about what was most important. And there were elements of the story that were removed from a legal perspective. We didn’t have enough evidence to say “This is 100 percent certain, let the audience make up their mind.” And so if we can’t do that, it’s not in the story.
I think it’s very important for there to be a line between being someone who just calls someone out in a YouTube video and being an investigative journalist. I have all this other information, but I’m not going to just go out and say it. Even if I personally thought Clickout was an evil enterprise and I wanted to take them down — even if that was something I actually believed — I can’t do that as a journalist. That’s not my job.
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Jackson Ryan
