Film, music and sports journalism are all pretty important to their fields. Stuff like ESPN, Rolling Stone and TMZ all feed into peoples' desires to know about what goes into making their favorite stars, analyzing performances or speculation. They can also break news that people want to know before teams or studios comment or voice the concerns of fans to people of importance.
There's also important work that can be done in the field such as "League of Denial" about the NFL's cover-up of concussion damage or Jimmy Savile's rampant and damaging pedophilia.
I think something important to consider when comparing game journalism to other fields of press is that journalism for most of those businesses cover live stories or current events. When the Red Sox win the World Series, that's your story of the day. When Ender's Game take the weekend box office, that's the first story coming out of the weekend. Gaming of course has some of that basic news, but the biggest headlines in a gaming magazine or website is material that has been known to 200 people in a game studio for some time before. "Next Call of Duty Announced" is not declaring something that is new, it's an announcement of a project some two years into development.
This is how product coverage, and particularly tech product coverage, works. Product journalists are not embedded in the labs leaking out bits of info every step of the way. They do dig in looking for scoops where they can, but their interest (and the interest of their readership) spins up when a project becomes a viable product readying itself for market.
So the question comes in, when is this "news" that isn't news ready for a newspaper? Unfortunately, that isn't really something a journalist can control: until a product is out in the public, the designer/producer/manufacturer has rightful ownership of access to that product. A journalist can dig in deep, can pressure a contact for scoops, but unless they do not care about putting hands on a product until it is shipped and legally purchasable (or unless they don't care about the lawsuits that their friendly contacts face for breaking a binding contract and allowing unofficial access to a whole team of people's creation... and that's if they can even get a deepthroat in a company, the vast majority of game developers aren't that stupid,) they must agree to the terms of the company granting them early access.
Sometimes those terms are unreasonable and irresponsible, true, but I think most journalists would agree that this is a rarity rather than a regularity. (And by the way, in some of the cases where bullshit was pulled, the shenanigans have been outed via blogs and "leaks" and other fatbabies message exchanges. ... and one very public firing scandal too, although that was more about a breakdown in appropriate management handling than publisher chicanery. I don't think Gerstmann would be working alongside GameSpot now if he believed his current bosses would fail so hard to back him up in a fight. That situation could have been professionally handled so differently and I can't believe anybody at Eidos - certainly not the creatives who actually made and cared about their game - really meant for things to go so far no matter how much ad revenue was involved.) Even those rare cases, such as the GTA and MGS4 embargoes, those are situations a journalist can prepare themselves for as best as possible; you know going in that you're being "handled", and your credibility is on the line if you don't come away from that situation with professional handling.
That time period, from announcement to release, is very complicated and delicate. The stakes are incredibly high for a publisher, and the coverage calendar is carefully coordinated to maximize interest without risking overexposure or fatigue (or in a case like Watch.Dogs, running too long a campaign and having your product virtually forgotten about as new contenders enter the fray.) A publisher is within its rights to maintain control of access to product not available to the public. And obviously, it is in that company's best interest to maintain that control all the way to launch day. But while it'd be plenty easy and legal for any game company - especially the majors with AAA sequels - to follow Apple's approach and hold off all access until the day the damned thing ships, no game company does this. GTA 4&5 had bad reviews out before they shipped. Call of Duty doesn't have reviews up yet but people have played it and said what's good and bad about it. Madden doesn't just ship every year with just an advertising campaign and a history of programmed pre-orders to sell it. Half-Life 3 won't (probably?) show up on Steam without some gameplay impressions out there beforehand. If a company did that, they'd be in their right (and even more scary, if a company refused access to every outlet but its own Facebook and community portals, that's be their exclusive right to the message until launch day... we're moving in that direction, people, the press has its issues but the alternative is more control and manipulation, not less, and that alternative has existed as an option since Nintendo Power launched.) A company has no real responsibility but to its shareholders/stakeholders.
But they don't shut everything down. Crazily enough, these companies choose to face the press. You may believe that they do this because they have the press in pocket, but in reality, there's no weapon great enough to truly tame the press.
Except, I'd go a stage further: Control of access *wouldn't* matter if the mass market of readers of game journalism didn't set so much store from it. If sites that gave reviews two weeks after release were as profitable as those that had one a week before launch.
Access is powerful because we - and that's the collective we, not the direct we - regard it as such. The solution to this problem is kinda reliant on changing the mentality of the audience for games journalism, and that's... nontrivial.
It's not on journalists side, it's not on publisher side - it's on our side. But to change it would require changing the practices of a crowd.
Boy, this post connects for me. Not many journalists I've seen besides jschreier are posting on this thread (haven't read all 30 pages, I admit,) but I'm sure tons are trolling it, thinking to themselves, "it'd sure be nice if GAF somehow came up with the right answer to all of this..." But the challenges of "fixing" gaming press are ingrained in every aspect of the gaming market. And nobody is innocent in the grand conspiracy of hype.
What's important (and why I wanted to comment in this thread... personally, I believe "Resolutiongate" is overblown, nobody even owns an Xbox One or PS4, so information is well and good, but it's a little early to stage a witchhunt leading to a pyre built of first-gen titles) is that we continue to chase solutions. I feel like trying to change the way the massive outlets do things the traditional way, while a good exercise (and if you go back, things have changed greatly over the years,) isn't going to be the solution. What gaming press needs more of is the alternative press, the good writers and video bloggers who are championed for doing things differently, in order to bring balance to the force. It's really hard to do (because money/interest has just not been there for gaming's outside-the-mainstream voices... also, because these are games, damn it, and even the coolest heads in gaming coverage let their passions overwhelm their senses sometimes,) but we need to encourage it.