fandomnews

fandomnews started out as an experiment. We wanted to find out if there was meta being posted to LiveJournal, its clones and other places on the Internet. We wanted to know how accessible it was. We wanted to prove that if it was out there, that this meta could be compiled into a newsletter that people would find useful. (We also created it because we were often stumbling upon all these interesting links when we were working on Fan History and we wanted a place outside of Fan History to share them.) For us, it was a fun experiment that taught us a lot. When we created it, we originally were thinking of keeping it going for about three to four months as that was when I supposed to start graduate school. Sidewinder thought that time period was right too, because she was trying to move and had extended vacation plans that started at the end of that time period. We never really foresaw that fandomnews would be something that we learned so much from and that we'd have so much support for from our friends and we didn't honestly think there would be as much meta out there as we've come to discover.

But we really fell in love with fandomnews, discovering wonderful new bloggers, finding fantastic conversations that gave us new perspective for how fandom functioned, and helped with finding posts related to my research interests. We accomplished our goals and then some. This changed things a bit and we kept going beyond the time period we originally thought we might wind things down. The problem was that our lives also changed a lot during this period. I started a research degree in sport fandom. Sidewinder bought a house. We lost two of our compilers. Our interests changed to be more about sport and comics and music and writing or less about fandom in general. fandomnews originally involved checking 30 RSS feed but morphed into over a 100 as we found really cool blogs, newsletters and tools to better identify meta. We went from spending 20 minutes a day to over an hour. fandomnews began to feel more like an obligation and this didn't make me feel happy; instead, it made me feel guilty.


I love fandomnews and the rest of our team loves it too. We just can't keep it going every day or even reliably once a week. We don't know who to ask to take over link compiling and posting. Given everything already mentioned, we've decided to take an extended hiatus. We'll try to post maybe once a month or if something happens in fandom that makes us want to compile a bunch of links.

Thank you for your support. We really appreciate it. Maybe when our lives are less busy and we've found our love of media fandom again, we'll bring it back on a more regular basis.


Sincerely,
partly_bouncy
c/o fandomnews compilation team sidewinder , tikatu