Newsarama is a website known for publishing news, interviews, and essays about the comic book industry. With regular contributors such as Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Joe Quesada doing his column “Joe Fridays,” to “10 Answers and 1 Question with Dan DiDio,” Newsarama was one of Entertainment Weekly’s “25 favorite online entertainment sites” in 2006 and as one of its “100 Greatest Websites” in 2007. The website has a stellar pedigree.
With humble beginnings, Newsarama began in the mid-1995 as a series of Internet forum postings on the Prodigy comic book message boards by fan Mike Doran, eventually becoming a column Doran dubbed The Comics Newswire on Usenet’s various rec.arts.comics communities. The name of the column evolved from The Newswire, to CBI Newsarama, before finally becoming Newsarama in 1998. The Newsarama column began to appear on such websites as Mania.com, AnotherUniverse.com, Fandom.com and Comicon.com, before eventually becoming a semi-autonomous site, Newsarama, hosted by Kevin Smith’s ViewAskew.com network of sites in August 2002.
Newsarama was acquired by TopTenREVIEWS in October 2009. Eventually TopTenREVIEWS rebranded as Purch Group. Purch consumer brands (including Newsarama) were acquired by Future US in 2018. GamesRadar+ is another entertainment website owned by Future US and it is dedicated to video game-related news, previews, and reviews. Apparently GamesRadar+ is experiencing a lot more traffic than Newsarama these days. The end is nigh.
A statement from Newsarama…
Newsarama Founder and Editor in Chief Michael Doran said: “There is huge crossover between comics, videogames, film and TV, so Newsarama becoming part of the bigger GamesRadar site makes total sense from a content perspective, as well as giving us a massive boost in terms of audience reach. It means more people will be able to find our content, we’ll be able to deliver better reach for our clients, and thanks to the bigger team and improved support, we’ll be able to expand and improve the way we report and deliver our daily content.”
Sam Loveridge, Global Editor in Chief for GamesRadar, said: “We’re delighted to welcome the Newsarama team and their expert content to GR. Michael and his team are experts in their field, and we know our audience love the universes, characters and stories that crossover from comics to wider entertainment. We can’t wait to add in-depth comics reporting to the site and help develop this incredibly exciting channel and content even further.”
Starting Monday, GamesRadar will feature all the best stories from Newsarama’s archive and new content will be delivered daily from the new gamesradar.com/newsarama site.
GamesRadar+ is an entertainment website dedicated to video game-related news, previews, and reviews that is owned by Future US. They don’t publish much comics-related content. And as of this morning, not a single Newsarama story exists on the website. Also, no new stories have appeared on Newsarama.com since May 29, although previously published stories are still being shared on their social media as of yesterday.
Seems a shame to see Newsarama will be abandoning their individual URL, but we wish them good fortune with the new arrangement and hope it is a sign of better things for the entire comics industry, even if it doesn’t appear to be a positive thing at the moment…
UPDATE: It appears a few older stories are now being populated at the GamesRadar+ section for Newsarama. And one recent article.
