Here are a few comments posted on another popular gay blog Joe.My.God. after news broke that Queerty was closing.
4real
“I’m not a fan of Queerty. I was when they started out, but after a while it seemed like they would copy the headlines from other sites and then turn it into something deliberately hateful. Cute name though.”
Darreth
“Every single time I went there, it was a giant diss fest. I stopped going to that site years ago. Sites don’t just disappear without good reason. This one was because all they did at that site was rag on everyone.”
Jasun Mark
“Their campaign against Corbin Fisher went past news reporting and opinion and became a personal vendetta. It stopped being a blog and became the MySpace page of an angry college student.”
A quick look at the new and improved version of the site seems to indicate a departure from its crude reporting. I read through several posts this morning and was unable to find one offensive article. I know! Not even one…
A post announcing the site’s return claims:
“While we are committed to maintaining the best of Queerty, we also recognize that you have demanded change. In recent months the Queerty patented wit devolved into predictable snark, eviscerating everyone and everything in its path. Some of the comments simply piled on. We will maintain the independent voice at all cost, going after with a vengeance the powerful, the hypocritical and the just plain foolish. But now we’ll also strive for a better sense of journalistic balance and fairness.
“In other words we’re going to keep afflicting the comfortable; only now we’ll take care to comfort the afflicted as well.”
Maybe GayCities was paying attention to the negative perception the site had before they bought it out. For the sake of quality reporting on LGBT issues, I hope Queerty’s new owners stick to the new format. It’s a popular resource that has the potential to be a powerful advocate online and it would be a shame if it fell back on the types of articles that lead to its downfall.