It just seems crazy that Nintendo spent upwards of $20 million to let people stand in line for 3 hours. I think gamespot said they could have flown every journalist out to their headquarters and shown them the Wii personally for that.

Does this mean that Spong won't get to go next year?

Why would it mean that? They say they want "including higher quality, more personal dialogue with the worldwide media"

We're worldwide media.

What's with the mis-representing of other sites, on this story? From what I read elsewhere, they all generally stated that the existing set-up was being dropped and it was likely a smaller appointment based alternative was the likely replacement; strangely enough, that's what has happened, so why have you stated otherwise in two articles, now?

It was more of a general question about the less mainstream game journalism. The name's also going to be changed to the "E3 Media Festival" which doesn't sound all that focused on games. If this is the case and they're reducing the number of attendents from 60,000 to 5000 as has been suggested by Lowerstein in the Wall St Journal then there's someone who's not going to get to go. It just seems as though once you've factored in the major developers, publishers and more mainstream game journalism sites and magazines (such as the Ziff Davis group and IGN) and CNN and all the other mainstream journalism then I can't see that leaving much more room for the smaller gaming sites.

Yeah. We're one of the bigger smaller sites.

Plus I can't see it making sense at 5,000. It needs to be 15-20,000 to make sense. If it really is 5,000 that'll just be IGN and that's it.

There already way too much colusion between the industry and the corporate press... Most everything you see in the publicly listed press is written with advertising revenue and profit in mind.