Criticism
Persistent criticism of the Newsarama has come from Rich Johnston, a rival comic-book industry columnist. Johnston has repeatedly used his columns to comment on the site and has suggested that Newsarama has an inappropriately close relationship to some of the major American comic book publishers.
One incident he cited involved Newsarama's coverage of a Marvel Comics publicity stunt that sought to briefly mislead comic book fans. While publicizing a new series in 2001, Marvel announced that it had uncovered a previously forgotten character, the Sentry, whose adventures the company claimed it originally published in the 1960s. The company issued a press release with this information, which quoted writers and artists and contained a false history of the character's 1960s creative origins. Though the character was in actuality a new creation with an entirely manufactured history, Newsarama (and other comic book industry news outlets, such as Wizard) reported on the story and quoted from the release without criticizing or challenging its claims. Johnston then criticized Newsarama and the other news outlets for publishing information they knew to be intentionally misleading.
In November 2005, Michael Dean in the The Comics Journal studied Internet comic-book industry news sources and evaluated Newsarama's journalistic performance. The study praised the site for the depth of coverage provided in some articles but criticized its reliance on press releases and the "softness" of the questions asked in its interviews. Dean focused on one story in particular, "Diamond Changes Thresholds" by Matt Brady. Though he found the piece qualified as "journalism", Dean also found it "contained factual inaccuracies, failed to get multiple points of view and sucked up to its corporate subject". The Brady story itself was eventually corrected of its factual inaccuracies by its author after Rich Johnston and others pointed out the errors.
In June 2008 the site underwent numerous design and content-related changes, and decreased its traffic compared to the previous months.
The new format launched with multiple articles on comic books, television shows, movies and video games. These changes have been questioned by readers in the comment section of some articles Brady defended the changes.
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