The Wire is our news desk. The fast-moving river of announcements, release dates, patches, and trailers. It works differently from the rest of Output Lag, and we’d rather you hear exactly how it works from us.
The problem it solves
Studios, publishers, and PR teams send out enormous volumes of news email. At most outlets — including this one, before the Wire — the overwhelming majority of it is never covered at all. Small teams triage ruthlessly, and announcements from smaller studios are usually what gets cut. The result: coverage concentrates on the games that already have attention, and most time is spent playing games and covering them for reviews, previews, and features.
The Wire changes that economics. Announcements sent to wire@outputlag.com are processed automatically, which means news from a two-person studio can be up as fast as news from a major publisher in just minutes, not days.
Our Thoughts on AI
We understand that AI, or at least what the mainstream term of “AI” has become recently is very contraversial. We believe it has no place in its current format near anything that involves any part of a creative process until the companies behind these models can find a way to properly compensate those who the results are based off of.
That being said, this industry is moving fast and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for a small outlet like ours to have any chance to survive and get eyeballs on our website, especially with as search engines continue to roll out no-click systems that absorb traffic before it ever reaches out website.
As such, we’ve built this system to utilize AI for a repetetive, non-creative task of posting gaming news in realtime. Our website currently operates at a loss (it’s a passion project!) so we can’t realistically hire someone just to take news blasts we get and turn them to post.
How a story gets on the Wire
- Trusted senders publish fast. Studios and PR contacts earn a place on our trusted list through a track record of accurate, relevant announcements. Their news goes up automatically. We’ll continue to grow this list once we know a contact is reputable and can be vetted.
- Everyone else gets a human. Announcements from senders we don’t yet know are drafted but held until someone on the team reviews them. Nothing from an unknown source publishes on its own.
- Embargoes are honored automatically. If an announcement states an embargo, the story schedules itself for that moment, and goes into a queue for human approval.
- Everything is auditable and reversible. Every Wire post records exactly which announcement it came from, and we pull anything that shouldn’t have run. This is a very fluid system.
Where automation fits, and where it stops
Wire posts are drafted by an automated system working from the source announcement, under strict rules: it reports what the announcement says, attributes claims to the studio or publisher rather than presenting them as our judgment, and is not permitted to invent facts, dates, platforms, or quotes. Every Wire post is labeled as an automated wire post, right under its headline.
The Wire is the only part of Output Lag where a post can go live without a person approving it first. Our reviews, previews, features, and guides all go through our editorial process, and no review verdict or score has ever been, or will ever be, produced by the Wire system. When we tell you a game is worth your money, that’s us saying it, and we own it.
Rather not see it?
Fair enough. The Wire is volume by design, and some readers only want the verdicts. The button below hides the Wire section from your homepage on this browser. You can flip it back any time, here or right where the section used to be.
For studios and PR
Send announcements to wire@outputlag.com. This can be plain email, assets attached or linked. State your embargo in the email and it will be honored to the minute. What gets through: game announcements, release dates, updates and patches, trailers, studio news. What doesn’t: anything that isn’t gaming news. A history of solid announcements earns automatic publication.
Any questions reach out directly to steven@outputlag.com.