IMPORTANT! Should EN World continue reporting RPG news?

[cignus_pfaccari]

The news page is my first stop, mainly because it's the front page, and I haven't gotten around to just bookmarking the forum pages.

I do like to see it, but for now, it might be worth throttling back the effort you spend on it. Certainly, report what you find, but don't go out of your way looking.

Brad

 

[Umbran]

Without reading the rest of the thread yet - I think I would use the news page a whole lot more if there were fewer items that were simple product announcements. There's lots of individual products out there, and an entire forum where publishers can announce them.

To be worth the front page, they ought to be really special - the M&M DC comics products, for example, I'd find newsworthy, while the next module from a small publisher, not so much.

Editorially, I think you actually have the measure - if people are apt to want to talk about it, it may be newsworthy. And perhaps fewer, high-value stories would be better than an ever-changing stream of low-interest items.

It is also possible that there isn't much that's actually news these days. Or maybe getting it would take more investigative reporting, rather than aggregation.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I read the page, but I don't generally thing product announcements are worth a whole lot of comment.

Perhaps we need to shift a bit to news news, not announcement news. That is, reporting? You could do less link-curating, and more columnists, writing about events going on in the RPG industry. Maybe see if you can grab some interviews.

I think ENWorld's main page is really useful for finding out Non-WotC stuff, though, and I would miss it if it were gone. Though I get that there's not really enough use out of product announcements to get the community talking.

 

[FreeXenon]

The news is originally what brought me here - specifically upcoming 3E news.

I stopped reading the news page when WotC stuff was no longer reported and there also seemed to be a (please forgive me) glut of news there to sort through.

I think for me Umbran's comment hits is pretty well.

Thanks for asking questions like this!! =)

 

[Knightfall]

I rarely read the news page anymore. It just isn't as interesting as it was back in the day of 3rd Edition News. Maybe there's just too much of it now. D&D 4e, Pathfinder, PDFs, etc, etc.

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

I've never paid any attention to the news page.

 

[S'mon]

I read the weekly news email fairly often, but I very rarely go to the news page as such. 99% of the time I go to General, then maybe some of the other forum pages.

Edit: The kind of RPG news I pay attention to tends to come from blogs; in particular product reviews from trusted authors (Malizewski's Grognardia for OSR stuff, maybe Sly Flourish for 4e) are appreciated and help me decide whether to get stuff.

I think that taking the entire RPG world, there are at any rate too many pdfs released to make news reporting of all of them in one place a good idea. I would probably restrict front-page news reporting to print-product only, and I'm not sure about having all different sorts of RPGs together. If I'm looking for OSR then I'm probably not looking for 4e or Pathfinder, and vice versa.

 

[Erik Mona]

I think it might be a good idea to recruit some "stringers," dedicated members of the community who have an interest in a specific sub-set of fandom. One guy keeps and eye on Grognardia and the old school blogs, another dude keeps everyone up to date on the latest postings to DDI, a Pathfinder dude, maybe there's a guy who tells us about WotBS and Santiago, etc. Find out what people like and get them feeding you news bits sort of like Ain't It Cool News does.

At Gen Con you could have tons of these people feeding the site reports on seminars, stuff that happened on the show floor, etc.

--Erik

 

[Starfox]

There is a news page? Now that I know, I might read it regularly. if I can find it.

Maybe whats really needed is to advertise it more. Or maybe I'm just blind - which happens not too rarely on web pages I visit a lot.

Edit: Checked up on the news forum; it was easy to find once I looked. In its current form it doesn't have that much appeal to me. See Umbran's comments above. Also, I find I'm not that interested in industry news anymore - I take a lot of time to warm up to a product line these days.

* Goes about grumbling about grog and old times.

I represent no-one but myself in this view, of course.

 

[Dice4Hire]

I rarely read the news page as I solely buy from WOTC and the general forum covers that well enough (Or I can go to WOTC)

But I think it is a good idea, and would recommend adding more links to interesting blogs, and such. The list of small publishers and minor works gets a bit tedious. I know it is harsh to say it that way, but most days that is all that is on the front page.