I pretty much only read Journalista!, Comics Reporter and PW Comics for online comics news anyway… and there’s rarely all that much in the line of important news in any of those. There generally just aren’t a lot of things unconnected from pimping the wares that goes on in the business on a day to day basis. The other problem is that a lot of people inside the business, who are the ones to know what’s really going on, just aren’t often going to trust a news site with potentially damaging (to some company) information, if they don’t want to be outed, since, as you say, most of the news sites have become vassalized by the companies in order to maintain their “sources.”

On the other hand, if “sources” are relegated to those only interested in using the “news” sites to pitch wares, what good is having “sources”?

- Grant

No … if comics were becoming more mainstream, they’d cover comics … I suspect the desire for more traffic leads to covering other media.

For one, I have to say, usually you can do one thing really really well or a lot of things pretty good. And it seems like they are shifting to doing a lot of things instead of the one and trying to tell us the one will still be as strong.

And another, I used to be a manager for sears and was with them for the last seven years while they went through several major changes. A couple big ones before the kmart merger and then of course the kmart merger itself. And the whole time they said the same things ‘rama is saying. This won’t suffer, that won’t change, this will be better; you guys just don’t like it because you don’t like change, etc. And seeing ‘rama mirror that (and many other issues and attitudes), really concerns me because all those things ended up not panning out for sears and they have only degraded since then. That is what I see for ‘rama. They will probably level out as some sort of generic entertainment site and be lost among the ugo’s and mania.coms and whatever else covers all the stuff ‘rama is going to try to cover.

Maybe they will figure out that if they covered comics better and more thoroughly than anyone else, then people have a reason to come there. If they maintained the community that helped build them and back them up, then they would give people a reason to come there. As it stands now, if you want good comicbook news, go elsewhere; if you want regular entertainment news with some comics, then go to ‘rama or any other site that does the same thing. Unfortunately it is sold and owned by some corporation that is snatching up sites and they won’t care about it’s reputation, just it’s ad revenue draw. I guess that’s fine, but that’s not ‘rama and not a very good long term outlook.

True comics journalism is pretty much found in books these days. I would venture that magazines put out by Twomorrows (Draw!, Write Now!, etc) are one of the few places to find a real article outside of that. Although the CBR columnists are good as well, but I haven’t read a column on CBR since Ellis’ column ended so I don’t know what sort of state they’re in now. I tended to look at Newsarama as a collection of press releases, and I appreciated it for that. Now I look at its front page as an obstacle to finding the news I want to read.

Check out the format of Dark Horizons. I love that site.

For non-comics news, I always check CNN, New York Times, and Fox News. Between those three, just about everything gets covered. Less often I check the BBC, and even less often, the L.A. Times.

On the old Newsarama, I could understand griping about something being relegated to a blog post, since they were mostly listed on the sidebar, but on the new one, the blog posts get front-page display like any other article. So I don’t see why that constitutes being relegated anywhere.

I’m not fond of the new Newsarama because it’s not as easy to navigate, the search functions don’t work as well, and the whole thing’s much slower than the previous version.

But so it goes.

kdb