Consumerist website shuttered

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I hadn’t noticed until today that Consumerist was a subsidiary of Consumer Reports.  See Wikipedia’s Consumerist for some history. While the Consumerist website remains accessible, the final posting “An important message from Consumer Reports” begins with “This is our last post on Consumerist.com…”. Apparently it will continue on in a much diminished form as a part of the Consumer Reports news page. On Talking Biz News, Chris Roush has a couple of articles “Consumer Reports to fold Consumerist site into its own” and “Consumer Reports CEO explains why Consumerist is being shuttered” which says most of the Consumerist staff will depart from CR. The New York Post has a more sharply worded article “Consumerist site shuts down after alleged mismanagement” by Keith J. Kelly. Draw your own conclusions…

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Thanks for noting this — I didn’t know about the closure.

I had been aware that the site was related to Consumer Reports, and that it was kept at arms’ length (with not much, if any, cross-branding or mentions of the other).

About once a year, I’d see a mention of it, go over and scroll through a clutch of articles, then forget about it until I saw a mention of the site somewhere a year later.

I went there now to read the closing-down message, and the images and text are huge on my screen with big left and right arrows to move from story to story with, like it’s on a giant mobile phone screen. The article title text (on my 21-inch-diagonal computer screen) is like 40-point font. I hate this kind of thing. So dumbed-down. Get me out of here, my brain says.

You can’t even see a listing of articles by topic or by date on their site now. I can’t stand that. Scroll, scroll, scroll, tiny attention span, big photos, few words, next thing-next thing-next thing. Ugh.

The deputy editor certainly put out an ungracious tweet (as seen in the Post article linked above).

It always seemed to me to be an awkward relationship/teaming-up, since Consumer Reports is quite staid, serious, calm and Consumerist was a Gawker product.

Shutting it down is probably not going to affect Consumer Reports very much — I don’t expect it acted like a gateway to membership of the magazine or CR website.

It seemed to me that it was mainly aggregated news stories anyway, not a lot of original journalism.

—
P.T.

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I had no idea it was part of Consumer Reports, either. I like Consumerist’s opinionated style, but man it’s hard to keep a web site going these days, especially with a no-advertising policy.

Tough situation. It probably could’ve been handled better, but I have sympathy for both sides.

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WildBill

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