AOL To Lay Off 150 People, Mostly In Sales; Folding Joystiq, TUAW Into Engadget

I was one of Joystiq's first employees, before its official launch in 2005. I was a graduating high-school senior at the time, and in a bout of senioritis I played hooky almost every day in order to hang out in the A/V room and surf the internet reading video game news. I managed to find their fledgling site somehow (this was well before "blog" was a household word) and sent in so damn many exhaustively-written leads to their tip box that they eventually started publishing them almost verbatim (with attribution, of course), and then soon after cut out the middle man by hiring me outright. A great time of my life during which I met a number of great people, though in retrospect I'm incredibly embarrassed by the articles that my teenage brain managed to produce. :P

And I'll still never forget the look on my mom's face when she came into my room one night waving a $500 check from AOL. I had been told we were getting bought out, but I was completely unaware that we'd all be getting bonuses! That was the most money that I had ever had in my 17 year-old life... and straight into the college fund it went. :)

Penny Arcade's comic today comments on the fact that Joystiq itself was reporting on rumors of its upcoming demise: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2015/01/30/godspeed

I'd go to TUAW just out of habit and because of its easy-to-type-URL, since it had been around for a decade, but it seemed stagnant compared to the general tech sites (engadget, gizmodo, verge) that, because of Apple's dominance, themselves became blogs about Apple.

Still, that didn't mean there weren't good niches to nimbly carve out. MacRumors Buyer's guide is, in my mind, one of the best examples of small scale data collection put to powerful use (how hard would it be for anyone, if they thought it out, to research all the release dates of Apple devices and put them in a spreadsheet). And 9to5Mac.com is getting big scoops even though its senior editor (who earns 6-figures a year, reportedly) is still in college: http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/apple_mark_gurman_9to5mac...

Looks like the people at The Verge did the right thing then, or maybe that's a root cause.

On the other hand it looks like Polygon and The Verge are becoming more and more like the same thing. Since Topolsky left there might be something happening there as well.

:(

I used to work at Weblogs, Inc. and had done work for all three of these pubs. The worst part for me is that the original vision of Weblogs, Inc. is dead. The vision was to have dozens of niche blogs covering topics people cared about. Sad.

What about Shingy?

Sad - no more WoW Insider either. I hope some of the niche blogs reemerge as independent sites.

http://wow.joystiq.com/2015/01/30/wow-insider-is-logging-off...

I used to visit TUAW fairly often for very niche Apple news that none of the major tech news sites would write about. But in the past few years I've dropped it for 9to5mac because it just wasn't hitting the spot anymore.

Looks like Autoblog Canada bit the dust too, just a redirect to their main Autoblog page.

Interesting, is there a full list of what's been affected, or did I just miss it in TFA?

Link to TUAW is typo'd in the article. Correct address is http://www.tuaw.com/