AfterElton.com

» see afterelton.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

AfterElton was written in english, for gay men in the american television audience. The subject was american television. i was not its reader on any axis of that description. It arrives here because of what happened to it rather than because i was ever in its comment section.

It launched in january 2005, started by Sarah Warn alongside Michael Jensen and Brent Hartinger. The name pointed at Elton John's coming out as the moment the culture shifted, with no connection to the man himself. Its older sister site AfterEllen had been doing the same job for lesbian viewers since 2002, and this was the second half of that project.

The work was ordinary entertainment coverage aimed at an audience the rest of the entertainment press was not writing for. Recaps and interviews with actors and showrunners. Also a running count of which characters were on screen and how the writing was treating them. In 2006 Logo bought both sites, which made a Viacom cable network the owner of two of the larger gay media properties on the web.

Logo held them for years and then let them go in two different directions. AfterEllen was sold off to another publisher in 2014 and kept trading under its own name. AfterElton stayed in-house and was renamed. Two years later it was dissolved into a sibling site.

~ the record ~

~ the rename ~

On 31 january 2013 the site announced it was becoming TheBacklot.com, and the relaunch went live on 17 april. The stated reason was to stop being read as AfterEllen's little brother, which is a real editorial problem and a defensible thing to fix.

What it also did was throw away eight years of a name people typed from memory. AfterElton meant something to its readers and TheBacklot meant nothing to anybody yet. A rebrand is a bet that the audience follows the product rather than the word, and on the web that bet is usually wrong.

~ the postmortem ~

On 29 june 2015 Logo announced TheBacklot was merging into NewNowNext, its other lgbt entertainment site, under a single editor. The archive went along with it. Nothing was canceled in the ordinary sense and no announcement described this as a closure, but a publication that loses its name and then its front page has stopped existing.

Ten years, two of them spent as a name that never took. The Hot 100 poll had run every year from 2007 and was the thing readers actually turned up for, which is a familiar shape: the traffic was in the annual ritual rather than the daily coverage.

~ the long tail ~

The domain now lands on a video channel. AfterEllen, the site that was sold instead of absorbed, outlived it by years and changed hands twice more. It ended up owned by the editors who ran it. Being kept in-house by a cable network turned out to be the worse outcome of the two.

What went with it is the specific thing these sites did before the mainstream press hired anybody to do it. Somebody had to keep the count of who was on screen and how the writing treated them, and do it week after week in public. By 2015 that beat existed in bigger outlets, which is the reason the merger looked reasonable to the people signing off on it.

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