From The Smog to Smogon's Flying Press: One Year On

The Smog: A Brief History

It has now been a year since The Smog ended and the Smogon's Flying Press (known as Article Workshop in its early days) chapter began.

The Smog started over seven years ago. At first, it was just for fun. A lot of articles in its time reflected the carefree environment The Smog emitted. As years went on, The Smog became more recognized. Its articles had a place in the community - Pokémon Biology, Judge a Pokémon, Trivia, and competitive analyses had become staples - and most of its readerbase looked forward to the latest issue. Time eventually passed, and releasing issues on time became a problem. Deadlines weren't met, readership was down, and instead of releasing monthly, some issues took up to five months.

The Competitor had been around for a few years at this point. The articles were high quality, but due to little announcement about their release, nobody really noticed when a new article was out. Around the time when The Smog was at an all-time low, The Player was created off the back of Pokémon Showdown's growing popularity due to its new custom room feature. The Player released issues more often than The Smog, and it appeared that more people were interested in reading The Player articles than The Smog. However, there were often complaints about a lack of quality control in regards to content released by The Player.

All three webzines were struggling in different ways. The Player struggled with quality, but its popularity flourished; The Competitor published exclusive content, but struggled with readership; The Smog had extensive history, but battled with releasing issues consistently.

The first proposal was to have three separate forums under a "Smogon Media" brand. However, staff from The Smog believed that it would be worse off for their zine, as it would ignore the solid history of the webzine. A month or so passed, and it was eventually decided that to combat all the issues, the webzines would merge under "The Smog" name.

Soon after the merge, Quarkz proposed moving to a blog-like system in order to enhance readership. After a few months of concern, everyone managed to ease into releasing articles at least three times a week, and articles became more recognized than they would have been otherwise. As for the name, we decided to go with Article Workshop, paying homage to one of The Smog's former subforums where the writing of articles used to be done.

A few months went by, and the staff decided that we needed a name that reflected what we were doing a bit better than "Article Workshop" could. After a community poll, it was decided that Smogon's Flying Press (named after Hawlucha's exclusive attack, Flying Press) is what Smogon's media publication would be known as henceforth.

The Achievements

Over the last year, we've released some amazing articles and reached incredible milestones. Let's take a walk down memory lane.

In the last year we...

Finally, we farewelled Toast++, Bummer, princessofmusic, Spy, Quarkz, and FireMage. Whereas we welcomed anto, Albacore, Lumari, Tikitik, and Quite Quiet.

Conclusion

Here's hoping the next year is even better!

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