More about the demise of Blog@Newsarama

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.