Newsarama

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Newsarama

Screenshot of Newsarama main page, 7/15/2006
URL	www.newsarama.com
Type of 'zine	comic book
Registration	yes
Available language(s):	English
Chief-editor	Mike Doran
Owner	Imaginova
Created by	Matt Brady
Launched	August 2002
Current status	online

Newsarama is an American website that publishes news, interviews and essays about the American comic book industry. In addition, the site hosts an Internet forum for comic-book fans.

Contents 1 History 2 Columnists 3 Criticism 4 Awards 5 References 6 External links

[edit] History

Newsarama began in Summer 1995 as a series of Internet forum postings on the Prodigy comic-book message boards by fan Mike Doran. In these short messages. Doran shared comic-book news items he had found across the World Wide Web. As these postings became more regularly and widely read, he gave them the title "Prodigy Comic Book Newswire".

In January 1997, Doran began to post a version of the column, titled "The Comics Newswire", on Usenet's various rec.arts.comics communities. The name of the column evolved to "The Newswire" and then "CBI Newsarama" before finally becoming simply "Newsarama" in 1998.

The postings quickly became popular, as the speed of reporting on the Internet meant that Doran could break stories faster than most other comic book news sources, which appeared in printed publications which had to be fully edited weeks before they were released. By the time other online comics journalists came on the scene, "Newsarama" had become an established brand and market leader. Although the column in its earliest forms reported both news and rumors, it later adopted a standard journalistic news approach.

Doran's postings left Usenet in 1998, becoming a "Newsarama" column on such websites as Mania.com, AnotherUniverse.com and Fandom.com (all defunct as of 2007) and Comicon.com before becoming a semi-autonomous site — Newsarama.com, hosted by Kevin Smith's ViewAskew.com network of sites — in August 2002.

Three months later, Doran left Newsarama — by now a webzine — to take a staff position at Marvel Comics. Matt Brady, a writer who had written extensively for the site, took over. Doran later returned to working at Newsarama, with Brady continuing as primary writer.

The site left the ViewAskew.com network and became independent in early April 2006.

Newsarama has been quoted as a source of comics news by the mainstream media, including The New York Times.^[1] In 2006, Entertainment Weekly listed Newsarama as one of its "25 favorite online entertainment sites"^[2] and the American Library Association lists it as a research resource in the field of comics.^[3] A subsequent Entertainment Weekly update also included Newsarama in their list "100 Greatest Websites".^[4]

Newsarama maintains a registered-member forum, talk@Newsarama, with over 25,000 registered users.^[5]

[edit] Columnists

Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Joe Quesada's column "Joe Fridays" (renamed "New Joe Fridays" in 2006 as a joke regarding Marvel's penchant for relaunching titles with the prefix "new") appears weekly. DC Comics editor Michael Siglain's contributed the weekly "5.2 About 52", and in 2007, DC executive editor Dan Didio announced^{[citation needed]} he would write a column similar to "New Joe Fridays", focusing on the series Countdown.

Other comics professionals and journalists who have contributed to Newsarama include: Eric Adams, Chris Arrant, Troy Brownfield, Charles Brownstein, Joe Casey, Albert Ching, Alan David Doane, Sarah Edmunds, Shelby Edmunds, Tracy Edmunds, Steve Ekstrom, Joanna Estep, Steve Fritz, Mike San Giacomo, Brian Hibbs, Paul Jenkins, Geoff Johns, Benjamin Ong Pang Kean, Jim Lee, Dirk Manning, Ryan McLelland, Stuart Moore, Rick Remender, Vaneta Rogers, J. Michael Straczynski, Aaron Weisbrod and Brian Wood.

Regular columns include "Animated Shorts" (by Steve Fritz), "Journey into Comics" (by Mike San Giacomo), "Tilting at Windmills" (by Brian Hibbs), "Write or Wrong" (by Dirk Manning), "Your Manga Minute" (by Troy Brownfield and others), "Super-Articulate" (by Brownfield, The Rev. O.J. Flow, and Jim Beard)," Best Shots" (by reviewers from ShotgunReviews.com), "Justice Socializing" (by Brownfield and Geoff Johns), "It Came From The Quarter Bin" (by Ryan McLelland), "Your Indy Weekly" (by McLelland), and "All-Ages Reads" (by Tracy Edmunds).

[edit] Criticism

The most persistent criticism of the Newsarama has come from Rich Johnston, a frequent poster in the news and Talk@ sections of the site^[6] and a rival comic book industry columnist whose career has developed parallel to that of Newsarama. Johnston, whose own methods have been criticized by Newsarama's Mike Doran in the past^[7][8] has repeatedly used his columns to comment on the site^{[9][10][11][12]} and has suggested in the past that Newsarama has an inappropriately close relationship to some of the major American comic book publishers.^[13][14]

One incident that has been cited by Johnston involved Newsarama's coverage of a Marvel Comics publicity stunt which sought to briefly mislead comic book fans. While publicizing a new series in 2001 Marvel announced that they had uncovered a previously forgotten character, The Sentry, whose adventures the company claimed they originally published in the 1960s.^[15] The company released a press release with this information, which quoted writers and artists and contained a false history of the characters 1960s creative origins. Though the character was in actuality a new creation with an entirely manufactured 'history', Newsarama (and other comic book industry news outlets, such as Wizard) reported on the story and quoted from the release without criticizing or challenging its claims, despite the fact that the reporter, Mike Doran, apparently knew that those claims were false.^[16][17]

Johnston then criticized Newsarama and the other news outlets involved for publishing information they knew to be intentionally misleading without comment^[18][19][20] and this prompted a vigorous defense of Newsarama's coverage from Doran and his colleagues who pointed out that their reporting was technically accurate^[21][22][23] and insisted that readers did not require their guidance to see through the deception.^[24][25]

In November 2005 The Comics Journal published a study of Internet comic book industry news sources by journalist Michael Dean which evaluated Newsarama's journalistic performance.^[26] The study praised the site for the depth of coverage provided in some articles but also criticized its reliance on press releases and the "softness" of the questions asked in its interviews.

Dean also focused on one story in particular "DIAMOND CHANGES THRESHOLDS" by Matt Brady.^[27] Though he found that the piece qualified as "journalism," Dean also found that it "contained factual inaccuracies, failed to get multiple points of view and sucked up to its corporate subject" (the Brady story itself was eventually corrected of its factual inaccuracies by its author after Rich Johnston and others pointed out the errors).

In June 2008 the site underwent numerous visual and content related changes.^[28] The site's new format launched with multiple articles on the movie Kung Fu Panda^[29][30][31], a review of the NBC television show "Fear Itself" written by Brady^[32], an article about the 2008 film Get Smart^[33], an interview with Julie Benz^[34], a discussion about TV show remakes^[35], and a new video game section consisting almost entirely of Associated Press articles on topics like WiiWare^[36], concern over chemicals in video game consoles^[37], reviews of the Kung Fu Panda and Indiana Jones video games^[38], the Nintendo DS Narnia game^[39] and more. These changes have been questioned by readers in the comment section of some articles^[40][41][42] and in the Forum section^[43] however reader criticism for the content shift can be found in articles before the official site update,^[44] but are not carried forward in the "current" versions of identical articles^[45] In response to forum questions regarding the current "status quo" of the Newsarama Beta, moderator Deputy_Van_Halen said "The old site wasn't bad, but it couldn't compete on the best entertainment advertising campaigns" and that certain aspects of the site, like the forums, were being rolled out with incomplete feature-sets, including the inability to embed images in an article (forcing viewers to "launch" a separate page containing the images or scroll through a "related images" box), the inability to send private messages, inability to log in using the Opera web browser, difficulties posting using the Firefox web browser, inability to "subscribe" to threads in the forums, mark threads as read or jump directly to new posts, use of Flash-based log-ins and longer page load-times because they "Gotta pay the bills" ^[46][47]

In response to questions about the missing features, users were pointed to a thread explaining how "emoticons" were re-enabled.^[48]

A post on the "Top Ten Members of the Fantastic Four" generated the most negative comments, including: "This was as lame, amateurish an article as I've ever seen on the Rama", "I hope this isn't the direction the "new" newsarama is taking", "Yeah, what the hell kind of article is this? First I lose my old account because of the switch, and now THIS is what we get for comic book coverage?", "Wow, this article was humiliating", "Is this what they call 'jumping the shark'?", "stupid... fantastically stupid", and "add me to the list missing the old newsarama. I can get Kung Fu Panda and top ten lists everywhere else. Come on..."^[49] When this article was pulled from the front page, and because it is no longer accessible from Newsarama's search function, certain users questioned whether the criticism of the site's redesign had led to the article's "disappearance".^[50]

In response to complaints regarding Top 10 lists, moderator Deputy_Van_Halen explained "Top ten lists are HUGE on our other sites. I would expect there wil be fewer of them here, but you know what? Everything ain't everybody's cup of tea. Look at how you all argue over comics!"^[51] while in the same thread Brady is quoted as saying "So even though the content is free, the access to it is one or two clicks, and the comic book news conten of it all will not be changing in the slightest, you'll be choosing not to read it?" prompting other forum users to explain that the comic book news content has already changed and that the moderators' responses to criticism of the changes has not been satisfactory.

Brady further defended the recent changes to other users by saying "Also (3) - finding the content is as easy as ever. It's all under the Comics tab. I'm not meaning this in an insulting way, but if you're so frustrated with not finding as much comics news as you'd like when you go to www.newsarama.com, re-set your bookmark to www.newsarama.com/comics . That, for all intents and purposes, will still be the "old" Newsarama that you knew and loved, without that pesky movie and television news."^[52] Some users have commented that this requirement of filtering content or bookmarking sub-pages to continue receiving comic book related content is indicative of the lack of focus on comic book news.

[edit] Awards

The site has been the recipient of a number of awards and award nominations, including:

• 1999 Eagle Award nomination for "Favourite Comics-Related Website (professional)"
• 2000 Eagle Award nomination for "Favourite Comics-Related Website (professional)"
• 2004 Eagle Award for "Favourite Comics E-Zine"
• 2005 Eagle Award nomination for "Favourite Comics-Related Website"
• 2006 Eagle Award for "Favourite Comics-Related Website"
• 2007 Eagle Award nomination for "Favourite Comics Related Website"
• 2008 Eisner Award nomination for "Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism"^[53]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Newsarama.com
• Alexa site statistics for Newsarama.com