I never bought into the mostly artificial animosity found between Star Wars and Star Trek fans. You can't call it an internet thing, because it existed long before then. It's a fandom thing, based on the incorrect world-view that you can only like one flavor of ice cream, and thus must hate all others.

So, as such, I consider myself a fan of most things Trek, not all (sorry, Enterprise and Voyager). And that meant I would occasionally visit startrek.com, not only to see what was new in Trek, but just to keep an eye out on what other brand site content folks were doing. I got a sense that they, too, like us were an undermanned operation thanklessly working long hours out of love of a saga. So, even though we had no professional rapport, I confess a sense of kinship with them.

So it really sucks to read this.

EDIT: Since the time I posted this, startrek.com has taken down the original message. Hm. Here's what was originally posted:

Sadly, we must report that CBS Interactive organization is being restructured, and the production team that brings you the STARTREK.COM site has been eliminated. Effective immediately.

We don't know the ultimate fate of this site, which has served millions of Star Trek fans for the last thirteen years."

If you have comments, please send them to editor @ startrek.com - we hope someone at CBS will read them.

Thank you for your loyal fandom over the years. It has been a pleasure to serve you.

****

Now, not knowing the business reasons that go behind a decision, I'm not about to shoot my mouth off about it. I can see a many reasons to revamp the site, position it towards the new movie, and overhaul its entire architecture. But laying off the team right before the holidays? I can just imagine someone looking at the bottom line and thinking, 'well, if we do this now, we won't need to give them paid time off...'

There's a lot of argument and dissection here, at TrekMovie, one of the better fan site/blogs about the whole Trek experience.

ph