Colin Campbell joins IGN

Long-serving games journalist Colin Campbell has been appointed as IGN’s new head of news and features.

Campbell has a vast history in the games space, with former employers including both the UK and US arms of Future Publishing and MCV publisher Intent Media.

Most recently, and having relocated to the US, he has been working on his own brand development project as well as freelancing for US site Gamasutra.

However, recent experiences with the IGN team at the IGN office whet Campbell’s appetite for a full-time return to games journalism.

These people are going to pay me money to write about video games, to hang out with a bunch of smart, funny journalists, designers, film-makers,” Campbell wrote on his blog.

For the past couple of years I’ve been working in marketing, creating blogs and news platforms for brands. It’s been fun and it’s been a creative challenge, but even when marketing is trying to tell true stories, to posit itself as journalism, it’s still marketing. It’s an entirely different profession.

Ultimately, I love news-rooms. There’s no better place to work. They are edgy, competitive places but also collaborative, friendly and noisy. Famously, news-rooms are places where deadlines rule, where the pressure is always on, where moods swing according to an endless influx of outside events, outrages, fuck-ups.

News-rooms do not tolerate the kind of office-speak, jargon BS that disfigure other businesses. They are places where plain speaking is just as important as tight copy, where individualism, skepticism and good humour are always in demand.”