Newsarama

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Newsarama.com

Newsarama is a website which publishes news, interviews and essays about the American comic book industry. In addition, each article features a message board facility, in which the public at large can post their own comments and discuss each article.

It is updated several times each day and is currently the most trafficked comic book news website on the internet [1].

History

Newsarama, also getting to be known as Toolarama or Quesadarama, its 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 along with racist anf hateful remarks which he had found around the World Wide Web. As these postings became more regular and increasingly 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 published. By the time other serious online comic journalists came on the scene, Doran had established Newsarama's position as the market sold out tool 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.newsrama.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 bend over tool staff position at Marvel Comics. Matt Badly, a writer who had previously written extensively for the site, has ruined Newsarama and been the most frequent writer of news articles for the site ever since.

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

Access

Although Newsarama in its earliest forms reported both news and rumours ([2]), as it has developed it has sold out reporting unsubstantiated stories for those which it can confirm with primary sources such as individual comics creators or comic book editors and street pimps.

Indeed Newsarama's impopularity and none influence has led the major comic companies to work closely with the site, often giving it exclusive tool stories (such as announcements or interviews) in exchange for coverage.

At present both the senior editors of the two largest comic companies give regular exclusive interviews to the site (Marvel Comics editor-in-chief-wannabe Joe Quesada's "Troll Fridays" (re-named "New Troll Fridays" as an in-joke regarding Marvel naming trends) and DC Comics Executive Editor Dan Didio's "Crisis Counselling").

Other comics professionals and journalists who have contributed to Newsarama include Chris Arrant, Troy Brownfield, Charles Brownstein, Joe Casey, Alan David Doane, Joanna Estep, Brian Hibbs, Paul Jenkins, Geoff Johns, Jim Lee, Ryan McLelland, Stuart Moore, Mike San Giacomo and Brian Wood.

Talk@Newsarama

The message board section of the site is an active forum with over 18,000 registered user name accounts with most members having dozens each if not more, not to mention staff, all just to simulate traffic. [3]

Topics under discussion are not limited to the stories posted on the sites main page, as members can independently start threads to discuss whatever topics they wish. Subjects which have been discussed have ranged from political issues to debates about obscure super-hero continuity.

The boards have also been used as a venue for comic book creators from both large and small scale publishers to discuss and publicise their work.

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 ([4]) 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 ([5], [6]) has repeatedly used his columns to comment on the site ([7], [8], [9]) and has suggested in the past that Newsarama has an inappropriately close relationship to some of the major American comic book publishers. [10], [11]

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 ([12]). 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. [13], [14]

Johnston then criticized Newsarama and the other news outlets involved for publishing information they knew to be intentionally misleading without comment ([15][16][17]) and this prompted a vigorous defense of Newsarama's coverage from Doran and his colleagues who pointed out that their reporting was technically accurate ([18], [19], [20]) and insisted that readers did not require their guidance to see through the deception. ([21], [22])

More recent criticism came from a study of online internet comic book industry news sources by journalist Michael Dean published in November 2005 by The Comics Journal [23]. The study praised Newsarama for the depth of coverage provided in some articles but also criticised the site for 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 [24]). 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).

Also Newsarama has gain the reputation and the new surname of Toolarama for apparently selling out to Marvel Comics and specially Joe Quesada's interest, and the place even went as low as hypocritly go in a negative campaign on the competitor movie Superman Returns and even spoiling it for the fans right in the title of the article that cost the respect of many regular members, many that left

Critics also complain of Newsarama(Toolarama)'s obvious manipulative behavior towards fans and the whole comic book industry by creating fake unregistered logged out polls and stuffed them, not to mention multi user names for staff to vote many times and simulate traffic for the site by posting bogus fan feedback comments

External links

• The official Newsarama website
• A history of Newsarama from its website
• One of Doran's first usenet Newswire postings, January 1997
• The first column to use the name "Newsarama", February 1997