In a post late Friday, Newsarama editor in chief Michael Doran revealed that the long-running comics news site will become part of GamesRadar+, a sister site covering video games. Both are owned by Future US, a media company that owns dozens of brands and publishes 80 magazines and 568+ bookazines a year, among many other activities. Doran writes:
Explaining the move, 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.
To spell this out a bit, it means the beloved comic book news URL Newsarama will now be a subsite of GamesRadar+. If it makes you feel any better, Total Film and Edge magazine are also under the GamesRadar+ umbrella because more people on the internet like to read about video games than almost anything else.
This seems a bit sad, even if it is the way of the world. Newsarama, originally founded by Doran and Matt Brady, goes back to the very Precambrian dawn of comics news on the web, as a series of news posts on the old Prodigy message board. It kicked around as a subsite of a bunch of sites for a while before getting its very own site — one of them being Comicon.com. In fact, it was when Doran and Brady departed Comicon.com that The Pulse started, with me as a co-editor, so I guess you could say I owe this career to Newsarama in some ways!
Brady and Doran’s work made Newsarama one of the foundational comics news websites. In recent months it had really been kicking ass under editor Chris Arrant, breaking news left and right in the COVID-19 era of comics. I probably turn to it first of any of my competitors, because it’s the only one where you can easily see the day’s comics news.
But alas, as I know all too well, comics news can’t compete with video games and media news for eyeballs. Hopefully the stories at Newsarama will get more attention under this new structure, and we wish all our colleagues there the best.
This makes me sad
I used Newsarama solely to check the monthly solicitations from comic publishers. I have checked, and there is no longer any links to the recent August 2020 solicitations for Marvel or DC. So with that, I will not be supporting Gamesradar’s takeover.
RIP, Newsarama
Disappointing to me, as well. I checked out Newsarama after reading The Beat, to see if there were any news items not covered there. Also, they did a good job of posting monthly releases from almost all of the comics publishers.
Discovered the change when I was forward to the GamesRadar+ site this morning. Almost impossible to separate out comics news from everything else — which, I suppose, is their strategy.
So, I’m going elsewhere. Any recommendations for a substitute for Newsrama? TIA.
I use AdBlock and GamesRadar+ is not AdBlock friendly. Very unfortunate.
Hoping they get more eyeballs ??
No, they are moving to a subsidiary of another website because comics are losing eyeballs.
Went on Gameradar’s website. The whole site looks like clickbait that delivers malware when clicked on.
Listicles cater to the stupidest people who use the internet. Unfortunately, most of them don’t read comics.
Another example of Gameradar NOT understand its audience is the inclusion of
at TV SHOWS in a list that should have been devoted to best games.
https://www.gamesradar.com/release-radar-our-pick-of-the-weeks-best-tv-movies-and-games-june-1-7/
rU Paul’s Drag Show, as entertaining as that can be, has NOTHING to do with gaming But the listicle shows HOW LAZY the people who run the site are.
I hilariously just finished working on my site to start tracking comic release dates as well as solicits (I hated the way sites never organized these into their own category) right as Newsarama pulled the plug on anything useful when they slid under GamesRadar. Shame. I was actually initially using their site to get my solicit info (I’ve found many other ways now).
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