Is this about game reviews, or game journalism in general? I understand gravitating to reviewers who share characteristics (sex, gender, culture, highest level D&D character, city or rural lifestyle (Thanks Adam Orth), etc) with me, but I've never really thought race would play much role in that apart from it's intersection with culture. I think of Journalism as articles that present factual accounts or issues, then support them with facts. For me it's like "Entertainment News" vs "The News" although today I'm not sure there's much of a difference in that anymore.
I'm not really sure I'd put this article as "trusted" journalism.
The author starts with an anecdote about an unnamed "video game outlet". What is a video game outlet? I would guess he doesn't mean writing copy for GameStop's outlet stores (if they even have any) but instead is talking about a review site. He doesn't name the "outlet", but then details he noticed no black writers on their staff. At this point, he should name the outlet and detail how he determined the race of the writers they employ. That is important to having this anecdote taken as anything more then then a random story. Assuming it's a true story, I can understand why an "outlet" would sever communication with someone once they start asking diversity initiatives, especially if that person is a journalist. At that point I would do the same, either cut off contact, or refer them to legal council (assuming it was unrelated to the previous conversations, and was more "out of left field". But again, one can't determine any of that because there are no facts presented to support this story).
He then talks about the support minorities received during the summer of 2020. He posts some links, and I checked them out. None of them link to anything about equity in the Journalism industry. I'm not sure how this relates to his initial point about minority representation in journalism. None of those sites addressed what he is talking about. The "publishers" link just goes to a Rockstar tweet where they were shutting down 2 online games for 1 day in memory of George Floyd, the "journalists" link goes to a tweet by Polygon which just links to a page with a bunch of donation links for anti-police brutality and supporting protestors (nothing about journalism or other career/industries), and finally a "halted story" link to GamesRadar stating they're not posting stories for a day. I'm not sure how any of that is momentum to address a lack of Black writers and video game creators at the structural level. He would be just as correct to state those sites were helping address the lack of Black research submarine captains.
Where I really feel this article falls out of the "news" category and into the "entertainment" category is when he mixes together statistics. He uses the International Game Developer's Association statistics liberally, but fails to mention that those statistics are for a combination of Canada, the UK, Australia, and the US. The US made up 66% of the responses in 2005. In 2021, the country of work selected as "US" falls to 39%. This, by itself, invalidates all conclusions he makes related the the "13.4%" number he puts for "percentage representation of the general population" as that is the US % representation. There is no way, based on the facts given, to know how much of the 4% of respondents in 2021 chose Black as their race, come from the 39% who also selected "US". For example, Canada accounts for 12% of the respondents where 3.5% of the population identifies as Black, Finland accounted for 8% of the responses and they have a 1% Black population. This makes the statistics useless for any type of comparison since the author is mixing and matching statistics from different countries. Does it mean there's a 13.5% representation in the gaming journalism industry of Black Americans? I doubt it, but...I DON'T KNOW because the data he provides is flawed in a major way, making it useless.
One more thing stuck out as disingenuous use of statistics. As others have mentioned, the author pulls out a "25% identified as being part of an ethnic minority" statistic from the 2021 ESA report. He links it right there, and looking at it....page 3 shows the breakdown. 8% of the respondents identified as black. Why would the author use that larger number when the data was right in the report he linked. He's not investigating Latino/Hispanic, Asian/PI, or Native American writer hiring practices, so why would he suddenly include them? He jumps right back to a single race in the next paragraph.
Then he jumps into quoting a deputy editor from Eurogamer that he claims is trying to help rectify the situation, yet he is quoted as talking about how they literally have 1 minority (not black, but minority) intern for 2 months a year, and then they give them freelance work. Which is exactly what the author is complaining about in paragraph 1! I'm not even going to get into using a Youtube channel with fewer then 500K subscribers as an actual source.
At the end, maybe this writer got ghosted because he doesn't support his points and uses statistics improperly. I clicked through his website and I see 4 stories written for RPS and 3 for GamesRadar, all within the past year. His Linked In shows he was a writer for the Duke student newspaper in 2018, and he lists a MFA from NC State (where he is also an English Comp Instructor), so I assume he graduated in 2020. To me, it seems like someone who is upset he's not getting full time work in a field he has little provable experience in and wants to blame it on systemic racism. Is it possible? Of course, but he provides no proof to outweigh the doubts IMO.