Today it was announced that the staff of Edge-Online, every single one of them, quit that place to move on to other endeavors. In a blog entry that is about as spiky as a blog entry can be when the topic is business matters going cross-eyed, the former editor in chief Colin Campbell explained that the publisher offered him and the site a “a gumbo of old media thinking, rampant cost-cutting and ego-driven control mechanisms” going forward. This was the reason for his resignation. One can’t help but assume that the rest of the gang there felt the same way, because they left shortly thereafter.
I used to work at Edge-Online as well. So what do I think about this whole thing?
I have a huge amount of respect for Colin and Kris Graft. As a longtime contributor to Edge-Online and its predecessor Next-Gen, I’m acutely aware of the amount of sweat and blood they poured into that site daily since Colin founded the thing four years ago. I also know they’ve seen the thing through its share of hardship, and I remember when the site gave Kris his first fulltime industry job. That they’re leaving after all of that says a lot of about how different the site is going to be from its original form, probably in the near future. I personally can’t imagine an Edge-Online without them, and as someone who worked closely with them for years, it was borderline traumatic to watch them leave.
But I’m sure they have bright futures; they’ve already landed on their feet, as is exactly what I expected for some of the brightest and hardest-working people I’ve ever collaborated with. As for the future of the site itself, I don’t know—as I said earlier, it is beyond my ability to reasonably imagine. But as I also feel a significant amount of closeness to Edge-Online, I have to hold out hope for it. It’s too difficult to think about the alternative.
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