Welcome to the Media wing of the 2023 Shacknews Hall of Fame class. This category honors publications and individuals that have contributed to the coverage and culture of the gaming industry.
When you're finished, use the Table of Contents links below to visit other areas of the Shacknews Hall of Fame.
Ars Technica was founded in 1998 as a hub for reporting on tech, politics, and science. Since that time, the website has expanded its coverage to the video game industry, a natural decision given the intersection between gaming and its other coverage. Ars’s news coverage started off as summaries of information from other sources before transitioning to original reporting based on firsthand coverage as much as possible.
One of Ars Technica’s strengths is the ability of its editorial staff to provide a range of coverage, some geared toward mainstream audiences and other content aimed at enthusiasts. In its first year, it gained recognition for its informative guide to CPU caching and performance, a topic of great interest to the website’s savvier readership. Today, the site hosts thousands of news stories, reviews, interviews, and opinion essays on technology and everything in its sphere.
The masthead for venerable tech and social news website Slashdot sums up its mission eloquently: “News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters.” Slashdot, often abbreviated “/.”, was founded in 1997 by Rob Malda and Jeff Bates, college students who published rants about something that interested them. That something usually had to do with Linux, the open-source OS used by many for decades, or other open-source software. Malda came up with the name out of a desire to create an “obnoxious parody of a URL.” Within Slashdot’s first year, it was pulling in over 100,000 page views per day.
Rob Malda oversaw Slashdot’s editorial direction from 1998 through 2011. More editors came aboard, all with the responsibility of curating news stories that would be of interest to the readership. Editors write a one-paragraph summary of the story and include a link to their source. The popularity of a story often resulted in the “Slashdot effect,” a phenomenon where thousands of readers clicked a story’s link and ushered in a tidal wave of traffic to the source of the reporting.
In the spirit of the founders’ interest in open source, Slashdot’s moderators are its users, who weed out offensive and inappropriate comments. This peer-reviewed system has kept Slashdot at the forefront of conversation surrounding “news for nerds” for over 25 years. It’s also garnered widespread interest and praise in the form of more than 20 awards including People’s Voice Awards for “Best News Site” and “Best Community Site” in 2000.
Computer Hope was founded in 1998 as a one-stop reference center for anyone in need of technical support for computer issues. That support takes the form of online forums, databases of hardware drivers, a chat to interact with other users, a dictionary to dispel confusion around jargon, and online tools to aid in troubleshooting.
During its early years, Computer Hope was a reference source for general computer information. As it gained recognition from outlets such as PC World magazine, the BBC’s Webscape TV show, and the Today show, it grew to over two million monthly unique visitors in 2002. That growth spurred rapid expansion, delivering guides, forums, and other tools to help users troubleshoot their computers. Some of the most popular tools include a way to list out all of your computer’s hardware and determine which components are out of date; “IsItUp,” a way quickly check if a website is experiencing issues or if the user’s connection is at fault; and Mr. Hope, an automated way to diagnose technical problems by taking users through a series of questions designed as much to pinpoint the source of an issue as to solve it.
Computer Hope remains active over 25 years later and remains one of the industry’s most powerful and useful diagnostic references and tool kits.
Decades before Korean pop music (colloquially known as K-Pop) would become popular overseas, there was one website dedicated to its coverage. Soompi was first founded in 1998 as a rare English-language website dedicated to covering different corners of Korean pop culture. Yes, that obviously includes covering K-Pop.
Soompi's profile spread in the ensuing years and became a major destination for those seeking news on Korean entertainment, particularly for English-speaking fans in North America. While Susan Kang helped found the site in 1998, it soon grew big enough to draw the attention of some larger companies. Today, it's among the many properties owned by Crunchyroll.
Under Crunchyroll, Soompi continues to operate to this day.
