Simpsons Channel

*pantomimes swinging a golf club* Looks like I’ve knocked off yet another competitor!

For years, Simpsons Channel was the main news source for the Simpsons fansite community, and one of the few sites dedicated solely to Simpsons news. It provided a script to allow other Simpsons fansites to put its headlines on their own pages. Bam, instant news section.

I can’t say it was particularly interesting – it was mostly just press releases and that sort of thing – but it did what it did well, always had a nice, clean design and, unlike a lot of its peers, kept going long after site owner Adam Wolf lost interest in the show. It did, however, have something of a Walter Cronkite moment back in 2010 when Wolf slammed the cheap, cash-in Season 20 DVD set and even encouraged people to torrent the season instead.

Not to sound overly self-serving, but IN THE NEWS would not exist if not for Simpsons Channel. I used to find “quirky” Simpsons news articles and submit them to Simpsons Channel, but they would never run them. So, I figured if I had my own news blog I could run all the weird overlooked Simpsons news items I wanted. Furthermore, I decided that if Simpsons Channel was the Simpsons fansite equivalent of The New York Times (authoritative, trustworthy, dry), then IN THE NEWS should be its Drudge Report/Gawker equivalent (gossipy, opinionated, snarky). I’d like to think of it as an unrequited Batman/Joker relationship.

And so, after a long 16 years, we bid adieu to Simpsons Channel, which joins Simpsons Zip, Simpsons-L, Simpsons Folder, Go Simpsonic!, and The Springfield Connection in the big web server in the sky.