jill pantozzi

In the past 12 months, Newsarama, The Outhouse, Comics Alliance, Multiversity and Broken Frontier have all had changes at the top, with various editors in chief leaving. Well, you can add The Mary Sue to the mix, as EiC Jill Pantozzi has just announced she’s moving on.

Pantozzi has a long history as a comics/nerd culture journalist, and worked incredibly hard to make The Mary Sue one of the leading voices for diversity and the female fandom for all things nerd. She’s a gem of a person, as well as a writer, and she’s really earned some rest. I’m sure she’ll move on to bigger and better things, very soon, however.

However in shocking news, earlier this month Chris Arrant was actually HIRED as editor at Newsarama! Like Jill, Chris is a former freelancer for yours truly at Publishers Weekly, and he’s also awesome, with an unsurpassed knowledge of the industry. I congratulated him on DM and even asked what he’s be working on and he replied:

As editor of Newsarama, my immediate goals are continuing in what Mike Doran, Lucas Siegel, Matt Brady and others have done. This won’t be ‘All-New All-Different Newsarama,’ but that being said Mike and I do see areas and avenues to grow in terms of the depth and breadth of coverage we can do.


Doran remains as senior editor at Newsarama, and George Marston is a staff writer.

And finally even here at the Beat some side bar staff box changes. Alexander Lu is working for the next few weeks as Managing Editor, helping us to survive Comic-Con, coordinating coverage from a secret bunker underneath Stately Beat Manor while the rest of us brave life and limb crossing Harbor Drive.

What’s behind all this changeover? I guess a lack of money would be #1 (just a generalized guess—I can’t speak to anyone’s motives.) Comics journalism does not pay anything at most sites (including this one) and the increased pressure on the ones that do pay to build traffic to make a penny from 90 different ad networks is intense.

Like I said just guessing.

Anyway, I’m sure there’s more to come on all this.

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