Newsarama - History

History

Newsarama began in summer 1995 as a series of Internet forum postings on the Prodigy comic-book message boards by fan Mike Doran. In these short messages. Doran shared comic-book news items he had found across the World Wide Web. As these postings became more regularly and widely read, he gave them the title "Prodigy Comic Book Newswire".

In January 1997, Doran began to post a version of the column, titled "The Comics Newswire", on Usenet's various rec.arts.comics communities. The name of the column evolved to "The Newswire" and then "CBI Newsarama" before finally becoming simply "Newsarama" in 1998.

The postings quickly became popular, as the speed of reporting on the Internet meant that Doran could break stories faster than most other comic-book news sources, which appeared in printed publications that had to be fully edited weeks before they were released. By the time other online comics journalists came on the scene, Newsarama had become an established brand. Although the column in its earliest forms reported both news and rumors, it later adopted a standard journalistic news approach.

Doran's postings left Usenet in 1998, becoming a "Newsarama" column on such websites as Mania.com, AnotherUniverse.com and Fandom.com (all defunct as of 2007) and Comicon.com before becoming a semi-autonomous site — Newsarama, hosted by Kevin Smith's ViewAskew.com network of sites — in August 2002.

Three months later, Doran left Newsarama — by now its own website — to take a staff position at Marvel Comics. Matt Brady, a writer who had written extensively for the site, took over. Doran later returned to working at Newsarama, with Brady continuing as primary writer. The site left the ViewAskew.com network and became independent in early April 2006. It was acquired by the Imaginova corporation in October 2007. When Brady left the site in July 2009, Doran and Lucas Siegel stepped up to run it, with Siegel taking the position of Site Editor. The site was acquired, along with Space.com and LiveScience.com, by TopTenREVIEWS in October 2009.

Newsarama has been quoted as a source of comics news by the mainstream media, including The New York Times. In 2006, Entertainment Weekly listed Newsarama as one of its "25 favorite online entertainment sites" and the American Library Association lists it as a digital resource in the field of comics. A subsequent Entertainment Weekly story also included Newsarama in its list "100 Greatest Websites".

Newsarama originally maintained a registered-member forum, talk@Newsarama, with over 25,000 registered users. In 2010, Newsarama dispensed with their traditional forums; readers are now directed to comment at the site's Facebook page.