TeamArtail Announces Cutbacks, 66% Of Staff Laid Off

by James Calhoun (CoyoteNet)

ARTAIL CENTRAL, INTERNET, 05-DEC-2000: Artie Prower, founder of TeamArtail, has announced today that 2/3 of the well-known Sonic fan site's staff would be let go effective immediately. This rather controversial move comes only a month after former TeamArtail staffer Mastermind announced he would be resigning from his position as fanfiction archive maintainer at the end of the year.

Making a short statement this afternoon, the press was informed that fan art maintainers Reave and Pre would be dismissed and all art archiving duties would be taken up by Artie himself. This effectively reduces the site's staff from three members to a total of one, a 66% cutback. Neither Reave nor Pre were available for comments.

Speculations have already started to rise concerning the reasons behind the staff layoffs. One of the more notable theories that have surfaced is that Artie may in fact be preparing for a shutdown of the site, which has been in operation since early 1997. However, many believe that this latest move is simply due to lack of enthusiasm on the part of the site's owner/founder, citing the gradual tapering off of Sonic-related content over the last two years from being a full-fledged news and information site about events in Sonic and Sega fandoms to being not much more than a fanfiction/art archive.

TeamArtail stock (ticker: RT) remained unchanged in trading today, as TeamArtail has not yet issued an IPO for "market-savvy" day-traders to blindly dump money into.

[Photo (C) Archie Comics]