Reporting explosion: Eve's news sites

3 years ago Eve news reporting was rather in the doldrums. EN24 covered most of the main nullsec fights but was somewhat sporadic and rather anti-CFC biased. Eve Tribune had after a long and stalwart effort petered out. The print magazine EON, run with very high quality standards almost since Eve's launch, finally folded. In fact the best Eve news site was not something that purported to be one but in fact the awesome blog of Ripard Teg: Jester's Trek, which was brilliantly written, insightful and averaged around 500 articles per year.

In August 2012 this changed sensationally with the launch of TheMittani.com. I remember looking at the site on the first day and the site then was very strange indeed. No articles yet, no news, no leaders but an impressive wall of legalese claiming copyright, jurisdiction, rights over privacy and numerous other sundry legal privileges. From day one it was aiming at a professionalism and size that was truly ambitious in scope for what is after all rather a small hobby. It seemed like someone was making a site to sell - which is rather understandable if one knows about the money made from some of the WoW sites.

From the start the site aimed to professionalise Eve news and raise the bar. The site has always looked fantastic and articles have often been very high quality. Allegations have been made of pro-CFC bias and from time to time that's certainly been true. The editors have always said they're keen to attract writers from outside the CFC but they've generally struggled to do so. There also seems to be a gap between what the editors are trying to achieve and what the comment moderators are trying to achieve. Editors eagerly seek out alternate perspectives while commenting that "Goons are lying" or some such gets people promptly banned.

If TMC added one very worthwhile news source in itself its wider influence may end up being even more significant. Most immediately they had a salutary effect on EN24. EN24 has actively been trying since the launch of TMC to keep up with its rival and has adopted many of the same innovations first seen on its rival. It now covers wider geek culture, has its own forums, and has twitter and facebook presence.

We've also seen Crossing Zebras morph from a podcast into a full Eve News site with strong opinion and historical pieces and excellent youtube series including the nullsec recap pioneered by Hendrick Talladar - picked up after he got sacked by TMC and ships fits with Elise Randolph. CZ has a word cloud on its front page and currently the most sought for word is "Hendrick" which should give some idea of how significant a hire this journalist is. TMC meanwhile continues to run its own version of the nullsec round-up but in my opinion neither one is quite as good as when Hendrick was doing them.

Recently we've seen a new site emerge: The Eve Neocom - your interface to the universe of Eve Online which shares the attributes of ambition, a team of writers and multimedia that the other news sites have and which elevates them above being mere multi-writer blogs.

(Edit: a clarification was given in the comment below by Proto:

I should clarify however, that we're not a "news" site as we try to deal exclusively with community updates, new player info, and general game guides.)

In short it's a good time for people who enjoy reading about Eve. And if you do something interesting in game don't be surprised if some journalist convos you and asks for an interview.