Newsarama
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Newsarama is a website which publishes news, interviews and essays about the American comic book industry. In addition, the site hosts an active internet forum, "TALK@Newsarama", in which comic book fans discuss a wide variety of topics.
The site's main page is updated with new material throughout the day and is currently the most trafficked comic book news website on the internet.[1]
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[edit] History
Newsarama's origins lie in the summer of 1995 in a series of postings on the Prodigy comic book message boards by comic book fan Mike Doran. In these short messages Doran shared news items about comic books which he had found across the World Wide Web. As these postings became more regularly and widely read, they took on the title Prodigy Comic Book Newswire.
In January of 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 would evolve from The Comics Newswire to The Newswire to 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 industry journalists, whose work was at that time was still published in printed publications which had to be fully edited weeks before they were released. By the time other serious online comic journalists came on the scene, Doran had established Newsarama's position as the market leader in online comic news and had extensive contacts and influence with comic book industry insiders which helped him maintain that status.
Doran's postings left Usenet in 1998, becoming a Newsarama column on various websites (the now defunct Mania.com, AnotherUniverse.com and Fandom.com and the still in operation Comicon.com) before finally becoming a semi-independent website - www.newsarama.com (hosted by Kevin Smith's ViewAskew.com network of sites) - in August 2002.
In November of the same year, Doran left Newsarama to take a staff position at Marvel Comics. Matt Brady, a writer who had previously written extensively for the site, has run Newsarama and been the most frequent writer of news articles for the site ever since. Doran has sinced returned to working at Newsarama. [2]
The site left the ViewAskew.com network and became wholly independent in early April 2006.
As present there is a members only forum TALK@Newsarama which is divided in to subsections based on content. It is the portion of the message board and commentary function of the site. It is an active forum with over 25,000 registered members.[3].
Newsarama has also been quoted as a source of comics news by the mainstream media, with the New York Times[1] using comments from Newsarama when reporting that Marvel Comics had killed off their Captain America character. In 2006, Entertainment Weekly listed Newsarama as one of their "25 favorite online entertainment sites".[4]
[edit] Access
Although Newsarama in its earliest forms reported both news and rumours ([5]), as it has developed it has eschewed reporting unsubstantiated stories for those which it can confirm with primary sources such as individual comics creators or comic book editors.
Indeed Newsarama's popularity and influence has led the major comic companies to work closely with the site, often giving it exclusive stories (such as announcements or interviews) in exchange for coverage.
At present senior editors at both the two largest comic companies give weekly exclusive interviews to the site - Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Joe Quesada's "Joe Fridays" (renamed "New Joe Fridays" in 2006 as a joke regarding Marvel's penchant for relaunching titles with the prefix "new") and DC Comics Editor Michael Siglain's "5.2 About 52".
Other comics professionals and journalists who have contributed to Newsarama include Chris Arrant, Troy Brownfield, Charles Brownstein, Joe Casey, Alan David Doane, Eric Adams, Steve Fritz, Joanna Estep, Brian Hibbs, Benjamin Ong Pang Kean, J. Michael Straczynski, Sarah Edmunds, Paul Jenkins, Geoff Johns, Shelby Edmunds,Jim Lee, Vaneta Rogers, Rick Remender, Ryan McLelland, Stuart Moore, Tracy Edmunds, Mike San Giacomo, Dirk Manning/Aaron Weisbrod and Brian Wood.
[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]) and has suggested in the past that Newsarama has an inappropriately close relationship to some of the major American comic book publishers. [12], [13]
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 ([14]). 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. [15], [16]
Johnston then criticized Newsarama and the other news outlets involved for publishing information they knew to be intentionally misleading without comment ([17][18][19]) and this prompted a vigorous defense of Newsarama's coverage from Doran and his colleagues who pointed out that their reporting was technically accurate ([20], [21], [22]) and insisted that readers did not require their guidance to see through the deception. ([23], [24])
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. [25] The study praised the site for the depth of coverage provided in some articles but also criticised its reliance on press releases and the "softness" of the questions asked in its interviews.
Dean also focused on one story in particuliar ("DIAMOND CHANGES THRESHOLDS" by Matt Brady [26]). 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 inaccuraccies by its author after Rich Johnston and others pointed out the errors).
