After nearly 3 decades, Newsarama is closed down

Popverse, which, ideologically speaking, isn't all that different from Newsarama, announced the latter site's been closed down by Games Radar, the last to maintain ownership:

The storied comic news site Newsarama is seemingly defunct, after a series of layoffs by parent company Future PLC resulted in the elimination of the last dedicated person working on the website. Long-time Newsarama staff writer George Marson announced earlier this month that they had been laid off earlier this month as part of a broader round of cuts across the journalism & events corporation. [...]

Newsarama was formally launched in 1998 and quickly became one of the primary places to get news, interviews, and commentary on the North American comic book industry online. The site changed as the comics industry and the digital industries changed, and following a series of acquisitions, it was folded into the comics vertical of the website GamesRadar.com by 2018, while keeping the Newsarama branding, alongside other publications including Total Film and SFX. In the past 12 months however, the Newsarama branding on the GamesRadar.com website was largely eliminated, with the comics coverage remaining left as a secondary vertical and writing efforts minimized to focus primarily on games, film, & TV related to comics.

At its peak, Newsarama had a full-time staff of three with various additional writers, videographers, and others working in a freelance capacity. That was cut down to two by 2022, and, following his abrupt departure, co-founder Mike Doran was replaced by a general 'comics editor' that was shifted soon after to focus (in title and in work) on streaming TV & film, leaving Marston as the sole remaining Newsarama staffer until now.

Considering how biased they were towards the worst of the industry's leftists, their closure is no big loss. Unfortunately, Popverse is little more than a continuation of the same MO, perhaps even worse, and it's not like the writer's pointing out whether they made mistakes that need to be mended.

A writer at First Comics News, who used to work for Newsarama, tells the following:

Launched in 1998 by co-founders Matt Brady & Michael Doran, Newsarama quickly became a must-read destination during the early days of online comics coverage. It delivered breaking news, in-depth interviews, convention reports, and thoughtful analysis at a time when the internet was still finding its footing as a journalism platform. [...]

I had the privilege of contributing to Newsarama during its vibrant early online years. In 2004, I began producing interviews for the site. By 2005, I was regularly writing for both Newsarama and Comic Book Resources (CBR). Those were exciting times; the comics internet was exploding with new voices, and Newsarama sat at the center of it all.

Interviewing creators, covering trends, and helping to document the industry during a period of rapid change remain among my fondest memories in comics journalism. Newsarama wasn’t just a job; it was part of a community that connected fans directly with the people making the comics we loved. My time there bridged my earlier work at Silver Bullet Comic Books and led to my role as Public Relations Coordinator at Archie Comics starting in late 2005.

For close to three decades, Newsarama set the standard. It broke major stories, platformed emerging talent, and provided a professional home for writers who truly understood and cared about the medium. Many of us who built careers in this space, whether as journalists, publicists, or creators, passed through its virtual pages.

Yes, please tell us about it. There's quite a few who don't, no matter what they say. Otherwise, we wouldn't have had the embarrassments seen since the early 2000s, like Avengers: Disassembled, Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, Civil War, One More/Brand New Day and Forever Evil. They never argued whether fandom should ask if it's time to boycott the Big Two, if company wide crossovers, forced villifications, forced leftist politics and forced erasure of the Spider-marriage signaled they were going way too far at the expense of talented writing and artwork.

The comics community is resilient. New voices and platforms will rise to fill the gap, First Comics News among them, where I continue the work I started decades ago. But we should take a moment to honor what Newsarama accomplished and thank the journalists, editors, and contributors who made it special.

There was nothing special in it, since the writers never took objective stances on what Marvel/DC were doing wrong. Not even Dark Horse and Image. In past years, they fluff-coated the topic of deaths in company wide crossovers, they even gushed over the worst of Green Lantern stories, sugarcoated the forced replacement of Dr. Strange with Clea using his codename (and IIRC, she was later replaced too), and made no distinction between best and worst Spider-Man writers. Some of those examples may be more recent forms of tabloid nonsense they wrote up, but with that kind of propaganda being put out, is it any wonder if nobody liked their news in the end? Yet the former contributor saw fit to fluff-coat the site's MO, serving as little more than an apologist, and if that's how it's going to be, he can't be surprised if nobody cares in the end.

Newsarama won't be missed. But it's clear Popverse and First Comics News won't be good successors, if their sugary tales say anything. I have no thanks to offer, so long as they don't focus on how it's possible for propagandists like them to make serious mistakes, much like the industry insiders.