It really is the end of an era, as Heidi MacDonald announces that her blog The Beat will be leaving Comicon.com and moving to Publishers’ Weekly midway through next week. The move means more than just a change in URLs, as Heidi notes:

“This is by far the biggest commitment to both blogging and comics/graphic novels that [PW parent company Reed Business Information have] made, and it’s pretty darned exciting. With the added resources, I’m hoping to take The Beat where no comics blog has gone before… I don’t expect the content to change very much except that I should be able to make the improvements that I’ve had in mind since the beginning, such as the return of comments, categories and so on. There might be a little less Clive Owen and a little more full length interviews, but I think everyone can live with that.”

The announcement of the move comes at a strange time for Heidi and Publishers Weekly; earlier this week criticism of an article at PW’s Comics Week section led to a somewhat defensive - perhaps understandibly, knowing what we now know? - post which asked “why [is there] so much animosity towards COMICS WEEK from the blogosphere?”:

“Mistakes are never allowable, and yes, we work hard to make fewer of them every week. But if you have ever noticed the frantic tone here at SBM on Mondays, when we put PWCW together, you’ll know we just don’t have the time for more than battlefield copyediting. It would be great if that changed, but if anyone would like to take Monday mornings off from their jobs to help us proofread, we’re open to suggestions… If you want to chastise us for bad proofreading that’s fine, but if you are the kind of anal ‘do as I say and not as I do’ type who can’t see the forest for the trees, I got two words for you: tough titty.”

(Heidi herself tracked the response to that post here.)

Controversy aside, the collective that is Blog@Newsarama wish Heidi not only all the best, but some “almost the best” as well just for luck with the new home. If you ask me, The Beat is one of the must-read comic blogs around, and Heidi’s one of my favorite persons on this electronic wordhole that we call the internet.

The only unanswered question is, who does Comicon.com replace Heidi with, if anyone? Are we awaiting another massive shift in the make-up of Blogistan?

This entry was posted on Friday, June 30th, 2006 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Industry, Internet, News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.