We are proud to announce the grand opening of Imperium News and simultaneously the closure of TheMittani.com after 4.5 years of operation. Our team has worked hard for months to bring this change into reality, and we’re very proud of what we’ve accomplished. Unlike controversial updates to the site in the past, the team at TMC/INN spent more than a month living in two worlds, posting articles to each platform to ease the transition to INN and get feedback from our readers at each step of the way. We’re not done yet, either – we’ve still got hundreds of articles to migrate from TMC to INN, new features to add, and that exciting ‘new platform smell’ wafting around the site.
A Necessary Transition: From TheMittani.com to Imperium News
The internet was a different place in 2012. Long before Gamergate, we realized that the official gaming media was doing a terrible job of covering Eve Online stories – either thoughtlessly reposting whatever came from CCP’s PR apparatchiks or attempting to leverage hit-pieces about the Eve playerbase to generate hits. We needed to fight back, and to do that we needed a media organization with enough controversy and visibility to power up our flak cannons, Chomsky-style, to put the Massively.coms of the industry in their place.
It wasn’t an easy decision to name the site after yours truly; in an amusing twist of Eve historical irony, it was Endie who convinced me to name the site after myself to leverage the branding and infamy to generate our initial media footprint – in fact, Endie penned the ‘about’ page that lingered on TMC since its launch, despite attempting to be one of my harshest critics for having this site in the first place during the Casino War four years later. He was right, though; I doubt TMC would have taken off if we had gone with my laughably bad ‘Internet Spaceship News’ site name.
However, the times have changed. Where TMC was once an insurgent anti-games-journalism site, traffic and accolades found our confused representatives wearing official press passes at industry events and mingling with the very people we created the site to shoot media bullets at. I’m pleased to report that I still despise most games journalists regardless of that fraternization, but for a while our mission at TMC drifted. There was the era where instead of being a raised middle finger at everyone who got it wrong. We tried to be Space CNN and be scrupulously neutral to the point of writing bloodless, uninteresting battle reports because we thought that was ‘fair’.
Worse, as time went on, our original decision to launch using Drupal as a platform became an albatross around our necks; in many cases we simply could not code a damn thing on our site, with basic features available on Wordpress requiring custom code for Drupal. If you are ever thinking about setting up a CMS/blog/whatever and someone tells you seriously that you should use Drupal, ignore their advice on anything they suggest ever after – trust me on this one.
Eventually I realized what we wanted to do: go back to our roots of fearless, outlaw games reporting that actually gets it right on Eve Online and the other games we play, but with a focus on our people freed from the self-centered site name – and no more goddamned Drupal.
We Want Your Feedback: No Really, We Can Actually Dev Features Now
Immediately you can see the difference on INN with the features we have at launch – the user submission page, a cleaner look and feel, easy registration, and a clarity of purpose and identity which was lacking in the twilight days of TMC. This is only the beginning; because Wordpress is so modular that it may even be Mittens-proof, we can take feedback from our readers about feature requests and (gasp) actually deliver!
Let us know what you think about the new site in the comments, and if you have feature ideas or requests, check out our Contact Us form. Want to join our awesome dev and design team? Send us a note with what awesome stuff you can contribute and we’ll get in touch!
Imperium Discord is the place you can find the entire INN staff – want to chitchat with an editor or give us a lead on a some breaking news? Click here and voila, you’re able to reach our staff instantly.
Coming as a shock to absolutely no one, we’re also recruiting writers. We’re expanding the scope of what we cover at INN, up to and including articles about the nutty stuff we get up to ingame; have a piece about how you and your buddies dropped 67 Titans on a hapless Ibis in Delve? Want to brag on your 40+ Rorqual mining op and the environmental devastation it is responsible for? Let’s hear it.
RIP TheMittani.com: August 2012 – November 2016
It was the best of times, it was the Drupalest of times, and damn it’s good to be here on INN. Thanks for sticking with us through thick and thin as our readers all this time. We’re only going to be kicking more ass and collecting more skulls as we forge our new path into 2017.
