Bent Corner

Heidi at The Beat has some more details concerning the news that the people behind the popular blog section of Newsarama are leaving at the end of this month.

JK Parkin explains:

Anyway, everything came to a head in September, when I decided to step down and the rest of the blog said they were going with me. The headaches, problems and lack of response from Imaginova just weren’t worth it anymore. But Matt (Brady) talked us into staying, promising some changes in how things worked, how we interacted with Imaginova and our first pay raise since we started with the blog back in 2006. He offered a pretty decent pay system that turned this from a side hobby we were all probably spending too much time on into a legitimate freelance opportunity.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, he came back in November and said those changes he’d promised were effectively null and void. So we decided to leave, effective Nov. 30.

JK Parkin states that he decided to leave Newsarama and the rest of the team, Kevin Melrose, Tim O’Shea, Carla Hoffman, Melissa Krause, Jeff Trexler, Matt Maxwell, and Jennifer de Guzman, decided to go with him. Or maybe not. In the same post over at The Beat, Matt Maxwell left a comment stating that he hasn’t yet decided if he is leaving Newsarama or not.  Maybe there’s others who having decided to leave quite yet.

It doesn’t make much sense for any of them to remain blogging over at Newsarama.  As I pointed out in an earlier post, traffic to Newsarama seems to have dropped off dramaticly since Imaginova relaunched the site.  If making money is their goal, they could still do that on their own site by placing ads for the same entities that were buying ad space on Blog@Newsarama.

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With news coming out that the entire blog@newsarama blogging staff was leaving Newsarama at the end of this month, I thought it might be interesting to see how if Newsarama’s Alexa ranking has changed much since it was acquired by Imaginova and then subsequently “made over” by the new owners.

The above chart shows a steady decline in traffic to Newsarama since Imaginova relaunched the “new” Newsarama on June 26.  By looking at this Alexa chart, traffic has dropped by nearly half.

The folks that post content to Blog@Newsarama have announced that they collectively will be leaving Newsarama on November 30.  On December 1, Blog@Newsarama will continue with all new people.  In other words, the only section of Newsarama worth reading since the acquisition by Imaginova is going bye-bye.  I wonder if any of these new people even read funny books?

JK Parkin writes on Blog@Newsarama:

It’s kind of bittersweet, then, to announce that those of us who currently write for the blog are leaving Newsarama. It’s no secret that the site has gone through tremendous growing pains over the last few months and has been moving in a new direction since being purchased by Imaginova. Behind the scenes, there’s been a lot of growing pains as well, and we’ve reached the point where we think it’s better for us to move on. Nov. 30 will be our last day, and starting Dec. 1 you’ll be seeing a new crew take over the site.

Later on in the same post, JK Parkin hints to the fact that the team behind Blog@Newsarama will be forming up somewhere else to deliver the same excellent content:

Like I said, this isn’t a goodbye; it’s more like a “see you later.” Take care until then.

Like a lot of people, I look forward to where ever they end up next.