I haven't seen this reported anywhere else, but CBR.com has laid off its editor-in-chief, senior news editor and feature editor because of "culture and performance" issues.
From Popverse: "CBR Is Going Through a Major Overhaul Due to 'Culture and Performance Issues'"
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CBR in its current form strikes me as something of a McDonald's of comics content. It has a very streamlined format for all of its content and reduces human intervention to the unavoidable, bare minimum. It is now a publicity platform with largely automated bell and whistles.
So I guess I agree that there are "culture and performance issues".
It wasn't always so. It once had a less economical name and considerable more spontaneous and personal content.
But its mission changed. Considerably. And the competition for clickbait and ads is far more savage now. It either needs very little editorial intervention or a lot more editorial power, depending on which direction they want to take going forward.
In fairness, CBR had to seriously expand their scope during the COVID pandemic. After all, there certainly wasn't any conventions or open comic book stores for quite awhile. Of course I also think it might have lost its way since then. The website lately reminded me more of an entertainment news program like Access Hollywood or Entertainment Tonight.
Your opinion may differ.
Somehow I lost my way with pretty much all of the comic book news sites. I haven't regularly visited any of them in probably a decade or so.,
As you know, I was a contributing writer for CBR.com for about five years. I had been recently cut from a miserable job and really just needed something on my LinkedIn page to show I was still employed and employable. I never made any money from CBR, but felt it was prestigious enough to get some clips, as they say, and amassed a nice round number of 700 articles.
Comics Beat has a follow-up, "Inside the CBR Layoffs and Bad Week", that reveals the people who got cut pushed back against CBR's tendency to want more work from its writers for little pay. I definitely felt that over the time I was there. When I started, I wrote lists that required 10 items; over time, it went up to 20 and even 25 items. Being the diligent writer that I am, it took a LOT of time to research the information that went into what I wrote, and the payscale did not justify the time I put in. (Once, I called on the powers of the crack research team here at the Comics Cave to chase down a reference to when Superboy first met General Zod, because what the Internet said was in that story in Adventure Comics #283 was NOT what actually transpired in that tale.)
And, like Comics Beat says, at one point I got cut from the roster with no explanation, but added back a few months later, probably in a cost-saving move.
I think Lee is right that CBR had aspirations of being a site like Access Hollywood or Entertainment We Used to be Weekly, but didn't commit to more than rewriting press releases and what real news sites with actual reporters put out, and I did plenty of that for them. I had more fun early on when I was doing trivia lists like "Superman: The 16 Most Important Firsts In His Life," or business stories where I could apply some analysis, like "Gotham: 15 Reasons It Is Not Lasting Another Season".
One of the people who got cut, Stephen Gerding, treated me well and I hope he'll land on his feet. But my entire relationship with the operation was conducted by email and through portals like Asana, as the Valnet company is in Quebec, which was one of my early experiences with working from home. I grew to like it.
Present company excepted, of course!
Travis Herrick (Modular Mod) said: