{"id":1148,"date":"2009-01-07T12:06:42","date_gmt":"2009-01-07T16:06:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2009\/01\/07\/1up-is-dead\/"},"modified":"2009-01-07T12:06:42","modified_gmt":"2009-01-07T16:06:42","slug":"1up-is-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2009\/01\/07\/1up-is-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"1up is dead"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday afternoon, it was confirmed that Hearst Corporation would buy the Ziff Davis game properties, except for the magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly. EGM was then terminated. ZD&#8217;s CEO wrote in a press release that many 1up personalities would make there way to UGO, Hearst&#8217;s low rent male centered, short articled, IGN-lite media hub.<\/p>\n<p>They then proceeded to lay off 30 1up personalities, many of them major figures in the site&#8217;s public profile. Ryan Scott, Shane Bettenhausen, James Mielke, Andrew Pfister, Rosemary Pinkham&#8230;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.joystiq.com\/2009\/01\/06\/assessing-the-damage-at-1up\/\">there&#8217;s a full list here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Given the bankruptcy status of Ziff Davis, its outstanding debts and the mass flight of talent over the last two years, the closure should not be a surprise. 1up&#8217;s reviews seemed to be getting shorter and its features were either reprinted stories from old CGW\/EGMs or lists. They seemed to have lost their editorial mojo, and I hear that morale was low as the uncertainty over the future of the site lingered.<\/p>\n<p>And it&#8217;s not like UGO had a lot of good options. They have their own in-house staff and 1up has a lot of overhead. And with ad buys down in all media, they couldn&#8217;t just merge and keep going, especially with materials that don&#8217;t have income streams (podcasts, for example).<\/p>\n<p>But this is a very bad day for the games media. Good luck to everyone who lost their job at ZD and I hope the transition goes smoothly for everyone who gets to stay at the new UGO.<\/p>\n<p>I was always proud to do work for 1up, though. They had good people doing good work. I always got the sense that it was an interesting place to work. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday afternoon, it was confirmed that Hearst Corporation would buy the Ziff Davis game properties, except for the magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly. EGM was then terminated. ZD&#8217;s CEO wrote in a press release that many 1up personalities would make there way to UGO, Hearst&#8217;s low rent male centered, short articled, IGN-lite media hub. They then [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-iw","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}