Another crazy week in the movie blogging world, and the future of OWF
Posted by Matt Holmes
The last few weeks have been the craziest weeks I have ever had to write about on Obsessed With Film.
All the Justice League, Star Trek and strike news has been frequent, often shocking and in terms of the strike, effecting every aspect of film production and will no doubt effect our movie going experience in 2009.
Yesterday came some really big news that I wasn’t expecting. TheMovieBlog announced it was shutting down.
John Campea, the editor and owner of the site got offered the job of running Scifimission.com, the latest of the Coming Soon sister sites like their horror one (Shock Till You Drop) and comic book one (Superhero Hype) and he took it, claiming he had taken TheMovieBlog “as far as it could go”.
Now, I didn’t know anything about blogs when I first stumbled across his website back in 2004. My daily website rota would consist of AICN (which ya know, isn’t far from being a blog I guess), ComingSoon (which as Campea points out, is THE site for movie news) and Batman on Film.
Campea’s The Movie Blog was a breath of fresh air. It would cover most of the biggest news in the industry but would have this incredibly vocal voice of a guy who wasn’t afraid to let us know of his opinions and then when he started a podcast (again, something I had never heard of until he did it), he really tapped in to something that the web was missing.
His podcast was far and away the best podcast on the web for film related discussions and would stay that way for four and a half years, as it grew and added more members to the panel.
Soon other websites would grow out of movie fans who wanted to do the same thing and voice their own opinion on the web. Slash Film, Filmstalker (which was branched out from Richard Brunton, who worked on TheMovieBlog for a while) and yes, Obsessed With Film.
Yes folks, there was no doubt that Obsessed With Film would not exist if it wasn’t for TheMovieBlog but whilst Campea always had a clear idea of what he wanted his site to be like, I would chop and change things around here on a monthly basis since the site started in July 2006.
I love Obsessed With Film. I like the community of visitors we have here but I’ve never quite known what to do with the monster I’ve created.
Is it a blog? Is it a movie news site? Is it a reviewing site? Movie discussion site?
I’ve tried to give all four aspects a go in one site and I think for the most part it has been successful but I think with TheMovieBlog shutting down… there may be a place opening for a movie blogging site to fill that void.
So yes and I know I’m going to be crazy for doing this, but we might be changing the design once again. MIGHT, being the big word.
Despite Obsessed With Film gaining over 35% of readers in the last six weeks, we could be going back to a blogging setup.
Here’s some changes I want Obsessed With Film to go through, most of these I’ve wanted for a long while…
- I want the site to have a bigger voice from the writers and myself. I want you to know who we are… what we like… and what we’re about. I want you to know the people behind Obsessed With Film and whose voice it is your reading each day.
- As you know and this blends into bullet point number 1, I’ve been desperate to get a regular podcast together for quite some time now. I think this is the way forward for you to hear our personality’s and a great way to discuss movies in a way that blogging never allows. The only trouble I’ve always had with this is that I don’t know anyone personally who would be willing or would even want to do something like this, so if I’m going to do it, it would have to be over the web with Skype, which could get messy.
- I want things to be tidy on the site. I’m going to make things a little less messy if possible. Sort out the tagging system, the profiles pages, the reviews pages etc. I want you to be able to search through our archives and writings better. This I can do but it just takes time.
- I want a generic style with posts. I think the site can often look confusing and messy with the amount of images that are just flying about all over the place, so I may go AICN no-picture style for a while, and see how that works out. It should keep the site cleaner and maybe make images of a bigger impact when they are rare and not with every post.
- I want updates four times a day. Myself in the morning, someone at mid-day, someone on a evening and then someone to wrap up on a night. For this I am going to have to hire more writers to help me out. More on that later.
That’s the current manifesto.
I want the site to be less cluttered. Cut off the fat. Give you the news and opinions that you care about… nothing more and nothing less.
I’m going to try and cover less news that you wouldn’t be interested in and just focus in on the news that matters.
Let me know your thoughts. Did you prefer the old Blog design… or are you happy with this one?
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Well, personally, I agree that there is room for the site to grow. As a blog-based site, with news as its main source I’m not so sure. Maybe its because I’m more of a “feature” article type of writer, but I felt as though the more recent balanced mix of news/reviews/articles was the best way to go since it provided the best mix of constant updates and news in with informative articles that went beyond what is often expressed by sites such as AICN. Sites such as that, also, function on the basis of moles and insiders, which OWF doesn’t particularly have, thus its news is always second-hand reports from other sites, and thus to some degree it is merely reporting what is already out there. In many ways, though, I like that about it, since i don’t dailey visit AICN or comingsoon, so its a sort of IMDB-like encapsulator of what is happening and being reported, while also offering deeper insight through the reviews and articles that a lot of sights don’t bother with. I guess I am biased since I work for this place but thats just how I viewed the whole thing…
The reviews and features would in a way actually be more prominent if the design did become more of a blog style again. We’d be keeping the almost ‘half’ and ‘half’ style with reviews and features becoming higher up the page on the right, with the blog content appearing to the left. At the moment it’s felt there’s just way too much going on on the homepage. So many links, and most of them visitors are just not interested in. From checking our stats, I have analysed that sometimes news articles are getting as few as 20 views. So it had to be questioned if it was worth reporting this if so few of you were interested. I think it’s a could be a far better step forward to only cover the stories you will care about but in a more detailed and opinionated manner.
I think though, it’s possible we will be incorporating a format which will allow users to continue using the current headlined format if they so wish, in addition to introducing a completely text-only based appearance for people who want to print off the blog on a daily basis and read it away from the monitor, or just users on slower connections.
John Campea’s crappy little site is going away. That hardly surprises me. This is nothing but good news here, except for the fact that some other morons gave him another place to dole out his crap –at least the taxpayers of Canada won’t have to see their money wasted to give that deadbeat welfare/relief.
And that so-called “blog” thing of his –or whatever the hell it WAS– was never really to be taken seriously. See it for what it was: some talentless *sshole’s vanity-project desperately masquerading as a movie site. Campea’s one of those moron’s who wished he was good enough to work in Hollywood, the industry had enough sense to know a talentless, inbred creep when they saw one, and sent his retarded ass packing.
Now he’s been left to wander the internet trolling for attention, and his own pathetic effort to give himself some notoriety has predictably crashed and burned. And you’re bemoaning this for what reason, Matt?
A lot can be said about John Campea (almost none of it good) but one thing that will never be said is that he contributed anything to an intelligent discussion of movies. He’s the last dipsh*t to realize nobody cared about him. He talked but nobody was listening. Allow me to write his internet-obituary.
“Of all the dim-witted morons ever to smear the web with their turd-laden buttprints, John Campea was in a class by himself –unfortunately it was the Special-Ed class. His utter stupidity was only surpassed by his idiotic opinions and non-stop bullshit rantings. His name will forever be linked with talentless non-sense and bloated self-importance undergirded by uninformed opinions so laughably foolish as to make Britney Spear’s most bi-polar lunacy seem sagacious by comparison. If ever an inbred fool put their stupidity on display for all the world to laugh at John ‘The Jackass’ Campea did …and BOY we did laugh! Good bye you assclown and good riddance. You are not missed.”
I can’t count how many times he bitched and moaned like the PMS-ridden little bitch he is about Chris Tucker! I don’t know why he didn’t change the name of that toilet he called a blog to IHateChrisTucker.com. No one would have noticed the difference.
There’s something deeply wrong with a moron who puts up six posts in a day and three of them are about how much he hates Chris Tucker. Or Eddie Murphy, or Will Smith.
He lauds Michael Bay’s crap, and thought Transformers was the greatest movie since Crank. Then he turns around and whines about how vapid and empty movies have become. That’s not just an idiot, that’s an asshole. I only regret that he hasn’t been rounded up in an FBI internet child-porn sting operation. Though it would hardly surprise me if I saw his mugshot on the news soon for exactly that reason. Because he sure LOOKS like the type of basement dwellwer who only emerges from his hovel to prey on unsuspecting seven year-olds.
Don’t sing this bastard’s praises, and don’t make it sound like somebody has died either Matt. In fact we should be glad his site is going away.
What a shame Campea isn’t. When this guy finally chokes to death on his own BS let me know –THAT will be news!
Hey Matt,
Thanks for the kind words. You’ve done a terrific job with OWF, but never be affraid to tincker and twist with format as long as your content is good. Format serves the content, not the other way around… so I think you’re on to a good thing here.
I love JaySmack, he’s so entertaing to read. :)
What a shame you aren’t and never have been Gianni.
By the way Gianni, how much free swag will somebody have to give you to get the kind of shameless butt-kissing and unabashed praise you gave to certain select films?
I think Bay gave a couple of Megatron kiddie-mugs, an autographed picture of She-Male LeBoof and a reach-around. Or was that you?
Honestly I think the site has a very good design now as it is. Its very easy to navigate.
Yeah JaySMack, The Times, USA Today, Time Magazine, CBS, MSNBC, 2006 Podcast of the Year, 2007 Podcast Award Finalist, MTV, MC at Comic Con.
It’s a real shame no one finds me entertaining or listens to me. Real shame. If only someone had paid attention.
But please do keep typing. I haven’t had the privilidge of reading an 8 year old rant since my nephew. I’m enjoying this.
You know what, I take it back. JaySmack it totally right and I suck. This message thread is about OWF, not about me.
Personally Matt, I really like the layout and system you have now. It’s pretty quick to find what you’re looking for and easy to get around. I’m not saying don’t change it… change it till the cows come home… but as long as you’re content is good, it’s really just a formality.
Apparently you’ve never had the privilege of an 8 year-old’s education either. —> “…privilidge of reading an 8 year old rant…”
And thanks for proving my point about you and an interest in pre-teens –eight year-olds instead of seven. Sure hope the FBI is monitoring this thread.
And if all these networks, publications and websites are so damned hot and bothered over you Gianni, then why don’t you go work for one of them? Oh that’s right, you tried that once…and they turned your ass down flat! I’m shocked, simply shocked, I tell you.
And if anyone did listen to you then you’d be like Harry Knowles or Jeff Welles, and be able to maintain that turdbowl of a blog you HAD. As it is you couldn’t get enough revenue or webtraffic to keep the lights on, so you had to go begging for a new place to cyber-squat. Now that embarrassing excuse for a web-experiment you started is going the way of all talentless mistakes and you’ve been forced to get back off your couch and do some work for a change.
Who says there’s no God?
This board was Campea-free until this morning. The collective I.Q. here has now dropped fifty points and is still in freefall. So please don’t stay on my account.
You want to have the last word? Please do. It won’t be intelligent or entertaining –naturally– but we’ll still get a good laugh out of it anyway.
Oh, and stay away from the nine year-olds too!
Cool it down a bit, Jay.
Did John run over your cat or something? We only you get this level of aggression when Scramble wades into a Justice League post.
Best of luck with SciFiMission, John! The views of JaySmack do not reflect those of the rest of OWF… or probably anyone else in the known universe.
As for this site and what it should become. I agree with you Matt, I think content should be king - flashy design is perhaps not as important as it once was.
Last week I got a load of info that I thought was cool (and hadn’t been posted elsewhere) but when the stories went up I got the feeling nobody cared.
I’d love it if this site could cover films like Control and Once… but I know people prefer reading about Star Trek and Justice League. If the site is to get bigger, there probably needs to be more of a geek slant to what is covered.
Will, let us reason together.
I don’t own a cat. I don’t even like cats -the animal or the stageplay. I like good movies and the folks who make them. I enjoy getting updates on what films are doing what. And I don’t care for the ignorant or the foolish –in my movies or other people. Gianni Campea violated both those morals.
I’m blessed with the ability to care deeply on damn near most things. I run hot or cold, seldom am I ever luke warm. My opinions and the way I state them reflect that decisiveness. I don’t have a chronic “Meh” response.
If that makes me alone in the universe then color me estatic.
If you happen to like Gianni Campea, fine. I never said anyone HAS to agree with me, in fact I didn’t ask anyone else’s opinion on the matter, so I am partially confused why you felt compelled to say that no one else shares my view. I never say anyone did, so what’s that got to do with ANYTHING? It certainly didn’t give Gianni any more legitimacy.
And you want to snipe at me, knock yourself out –it’s water off a duck’s back far as I’m concerned, which frankly isn’t very much. I’ve said what I have about Gianni on principle. Giving back a denigrating reply to your insulting me would be mere reflex. I don’t feel passionately about knee-jerk responses, even when provoked.
But (and I say this in all detached objectivity) as I’m sure you’ve noticed, nobody else has said a syllable in Gianni’s defense except you. I’ll be the first to admit I am more acerbic than acid when I get pissed, and this can rub a lot of folks wrong very quickly, but don’t you find it a little odd that you and you alone are the sole voice saying ANYTHING in Gianni’s defense, after the multiple text-lashings I’ve dispensed on him?
You might want to do another straw-poll on just whose opinion isn’t shared by that “known universe” you were talking about. Because from my humble vantage point it seems you’re the one sitting by his lonesome…
Hey Will,
Thanks for the kind words. Just leave Jay alone, He likes to piss and moan and I learned a long time ago that it’s just best to sit back and laugh at him. Trolls like Jay are amusing that way. Movie Blog wasn’t generating enough revenue to support me? HAHAHA! And for the record, I never applied to any media job. Both the Hollywood studio job (which I turned down) and the VH1 show both approached me.
Anyway, thanks again Will and Matt.
Gianni, I’ve not been to your site in ages and my movie news has been gloriously BS-free ever since. So if you really were laughing at anything in all this time then I suggest you go back to whatever rubber room you escaped from, because you’re still hearing voices.
BTW I enjoy needling you about all these alleged media opportunities that you claim you’ve had — the story gets better every time you tell it!
Not surpisingly though, nobody else in the universe -known or otherwise- has ever corroborated your delusional fantasies of being SO in demand. I almost wish you really had gotten an offer from VH1. You’d be a lot easier to laugh at than that stupid sock puppet.
Nuff said.
go for it matt. do what you think needs to be done.
All you other guys sound like a bunch of trekkies bitchin about kirk or picard. Jay you should devote more time to pickin on John or Gianni whatever the hell his name is cause I can sense your true feeling. Whereas otherwise your just long winded