201511181116.jpg

Will any geeks news sites be left standing as 2015 draws to a close? I would have thought io9, the nerd part of the Gawker media empire, would have been the safest, but I guess it couldn’t pull its weight as a standalone brand, and has just been folded into Gizmodo, the massively huge and popular tech blog. This time there was no editor diaspora, as Charlie Jane Anders will continue to run the io9 branded content at Gizmodo. And it was part of a massive reargue at Gawker overall, with Valleywag (Sillicon Valley news) and Defamer (general gossip) also shut down. The Gawker flagship brand will shift to cover politics, because we’re in an election cycle and civilization is in danger, I guess.

“FYI, io9 and Gizmodo have been getting closer since January,” Anders wrote. “We’ll still exist as part of Gizmodo, and I’m still EiC.” In other tweets, Anders clarified that io9 will become a “section” of Gizmodo, and that eventually (it’s not yet clear when) io9.com will redirect to a Gizmodo subsite, though “all the old articles will remain online.” The merging of io9 and Gizmodo has actually been in the works for months, as the sites have shared teams since January.

io9 launched in 2008 with an agenda of futurism and science fiction, before becoming just another nerd website with Game of Thrones teasers and Marvel and DC reveals—albeit some excellent writing and top level access. 

Is it even possible to keep a standalone nerd blog running any more? Watch this space. As long as there is a light on, the answer is Yes!

1 COMMENT

Comments are closed.