In March 2000, the presidential campaign was just beginning to coalesce around Al Gore and George W. Bush. Vladimir Putin had just been elected president of Russia. The NASDAQ composite index reached yet another all-time high amid fears of a dot-com bubble burst.

Looking at all this major news, Newsweek decided to devote a cover to the Japanese launch of the PlayStation 2.

"It was our ninth best-selling cover that year, behind the final four on the first Survivor," says N'Gai Croal, Newsweek's video game reporter who worked on the cover story with Stephen Levy. The cover came after an awakening for Croal and his editors about the importance of this burgeoning medium. "[In 1999] my editors signed off on me going on a two-and-a-half week trip around the industry, from Bungie to Ion Storm to Microsoft. At the end of that, I said, 'I've seen the future, and we need to cover this more.'"

Convincing a mainstream outlet that they need to cover games is not always such an easy sell, though. "For me, it was a constant struggle at CNN," says Chris Morris, who wrote CNN/Money's Game Over column until this March. "It took years of lobbying -- and even when the Game Over column proved successful, there was still a contingent of management that didn't want it to run ... I wrote for CNN/Money, so a good bit of the resistance came from the mindset that games weren't 'serious enough' for the audience."

Yes, despite increasing penetration into the public consciousness and industry revenues that rival annual box office receipts, video games still have trouble attracting one important audience – mainstream editors. "My editors don't know videogames, so they can't tell me how to cover it," says Croal. "They kind of get it, in the abstract. But they don't play games, so for them, it's invisible. They're interested in games to the extent that my blog is our most successful blog, by an order of magnitude. That's it."

But that's beginning to change, at least at some of the younger, hipper outlets. "My editors play games, and beyond that, my company makes games," says Stephen Totilo, who covers games for MTV. "Not just web games, but they do things like buy [Guitar Hero creator] Harmonix, so people here buy into the relevance of games in a big way."

Indeed, compared to other mainstream outlets, MTV seemed eager to jump into the games space. "In my case, it was actually a major media outlet seeking out a games reporter, which struck me as unusual but refreshing," Totilo said. "They brought me in for an interview and told me they knew that celebrity-based gaming coverage wouldn't cut it. I was, quite frankly, shocked. It helps that my boss and his boss both have game systems and play stuff."

Others had to use a different angle to break into the mainstream. "I found sympathetic editors on the Marketplace page of the Wall Street Journal, where our coverage gave people insight into weird subcultures of strange animals doing funny things like winning Ferraris in game tournaments," said Dean Takahashi, who currently writes about games for the San Jose Mercury News. "I think the 'celebrities' in the game space are the folks that are viewed as weird, like the people who play WoW all night long or the pro gamers. They're curiosities that can be laughed at."

And that's part of the problem. Games can't really match the sexy, celebrity-fueled image of music and movies in the competition for entertainment coverage space. "Game developers are not celebrities, and we're very much in a celebrity moment," Croal said. "Until [Assassin's Creed producer] Jade Raymond is on the cover of US Weekly and [God of War creator] David Jaffe is on TMZ, celebs will keep trumping games." It's both a blessing and a curse, Croal said. "The irony is that we have way more access to developers and publishers than reporters have to actors, musicians and movie execs -- but we can't get the space because games aren't sexy."

Getting editors and readers to care about something besides celebrities is just one challenge of writing for a mainstream audience. Getting them to just understand games is another. "We all get used to the vocabulary," Morris said. "But say 'd-pad' to your parent or grandparent and they'll look at you like Victor, the RCA dog. ... I always considered it my challenge to write for a mainstream audience, but in a style that gamers will appreciate and not feel like they're being spoken down to."

The key, mainstream writers agree, is to find angles that will appeal to gamers but also to a wider audience. "I've written pieces that were about how developers decide what to do with virtual dead bodies after you shoot enemies," Totilo said. "That kind of story doesn't depend on people knowing what games I'm referring to. It's just interesting ... I hope!"

Good angles or no, video game coverage in the mainstream might just be a victim of bad timing. "I think many newspapers embraced gaming coverage to go after young readers," Takahashi said. "I fear that they may conclude that they've lost that battle. Therefore the gaming coverage will never measure up to online coverage. So it may be cut back."

With the entire print journalism industry in decline, game coverage is often one of the first things to go. "The declining interest in games in [Newsweek] has to do with evaporating ad pages as advertisers move more to online," said Croal, who now writes the bulk of his coverage for Newsweek's Level Up blog. "Look at a recent issue of Time or Newsweek. The mags are getting thinner and thinner. In that kind of environment, covering games in print is a luxury they can't afford."

So will game coverage ever become another universal pillar of coverage at mainstream arts desks? It depends on who you ask. "I don't think video games will ever be covered as broadly as movies, because I don't think they'll ever quite attain as universal an appeal," Totilo said. "Even as a greater percentage of the population is made up of gamers, individual games will continue to require more time, money and effort to engage in than a movie you can drive to the theater to see or download off the internet."

For others, the question isn't whether games will remain popular, but whether newspapers and magazines will. "I think that as older editors die off and young game-savvy editors take over, the coverage will shift, following the same demographic trends," Takahashi said. "The question is whether mainstream media will last that long."

In the end, no matter what the format is, people will always want to know about the latest games. "With the future of journalism moving online, videogame coverage is well-positioned to thrive and survive," Croal said. "As for the nature and quality of that coverage? To be determined."

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Media Coverage is an opinion column. The opinions expressed in this column are solely the opinions of the columnist and are not necessarily the opinions of GameDaily.com.