Starting on the evening of February 12, Kotaku will begin to offer scheduled programming.
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What does this mean?
We're changing. Not completely, of course. We are still a website. We are still one built on a love for video games and a passion for both reporting and writing about them.
(You probably shouldn't call us a blog, though, because that term lost meaning ages ago.)
We'll still be right here at Kotaku.com, updating you with news and opinion (mostly) about video games at least every 30 minutes, but usually faster than that. In other words, a lot isn't changing at all.
What will change is that, at certain hours of the day, Kotaku will transform. On Wednesdays at 2PM Eastern, for example, one of our most passionate computer gamers on the team, Mike Fahey, will take over and write and curate two hours of PC gaming-centric coverage. On Thursday nights, Kirk Hamilton, arguably the best writer about video game music around, will turn Kotaku into a site all about, well, games and music. The site will look different when any of these programming blocks are in effect.
At 6pm ET, Wednesday through Friday, our sports-reporting ace Owen Good will start providing a blast of sports gaming news. Evan Narcisse, who can write about comics with the best of them, will run coverage of comic books for an hour each Tuesday.
On Mondays, we'll give you stuff to laugh about.
On Fridays, we'll get you angry.
Every day at noon eastern, we'll share cool stuff to watch and show you cool new games to download or load in browsers (think of this chunk, which we're calling "Watch This, Play This" as our way to help you goof off at work or school).
Luke Plunkett and Kirk Hamilton will dedicate Kotaku's final hour of each weekday to old games. And Brian Ashcraft will oversee a wonderful expansion of our coverage from Japan, China and Korea with the new, early-morning four-hour block of Kotaku East—with new members of our expanding team writing about and showing you glimpses of video games and culture from four major Asian cities.
We've sometimes had readers ask us why we cover what we cover. Others have asked us for help finding the content they want on Kotaku. It's our job to make Kotaku's identity clear. We're a site that's first and foremost about video games but also about the intersections that gaming and gaming culture have with the world at large... extending out even to things like comic books which, frankly, are simply a passion we believe that many gamers have. I hope that our new programming blocks will make Kotaku's flavors more obvious, more easy to find (or avoid!), and more fun to sample.
Don't want to read about comics on Kotaku? Stay away from the site on Tuesday's from 3-4pm ET. Want to read about retro games? Tune in from 11pm to midnight Monday through Friday.
The Kotaku that our most loyal readers have loved is not going away. In our un-scheduled hours, we will continue to bring you the gaming-centric news that regular readers have depended on Kotaku for. We'll continue to cover breaking news when it happens—even if we have to interrupt our regularly-scheduled programming. We'll keep on reviewing games, reporting stories and analyzing the most interesting goings on in gaming. We'll even run stories that could go in our new blocks outside of the new blocks. If a story is breaking and you need to know on Monday, we're not going to sit on it until Wednesday.
Take a look at the schedule. Find the programming you like and make a note of it. Tune back in to Kotaku when the time is right for you.
This is the start of a new Kotaku, one we are thrilled to bring you and that we hope you'll be delighted to read.
UPDATE: Since many have asked, I want to make it clear that all content on our site will be accessible at any time. We won't make non-programming-block content inaccessible during programming block hours. We won't remove programming block content after the hours end. You'll be able to scroll through our stack of stories at any time, as you do now. No change. We're not becoming a broadcaster. We're sticking with the Internet and its infinite DVR-like capabilities.