Welcome to another edition of the Fans Week Podcast, also on mediumwaves 1575 KHz for the greater Milan area. From Paris I’m Jessica Carter-Wilson.
FansWeek Is Dead. Long Live PressBeat.
By Jessica Carter-Wilson | Pressbeat.org | Paris, June 3, 2026
Today’s news: Pressbeat.org has launched as a successor publication to FansWeek, continuing satirical journalism under a new name and domain.
I never liked funerals anyway — too much black, too many people pretending they knew the deceased, and the open casket thing is just narcissism disguised as grief. So no, I’m not going to eulogize FansWeek. It didn’t die of natural causes. It was murdered by the same bureaucratic coma that turned every independent publication into a newsletter nobody reads past the third paragraph.
But here I am. On the new thing. Writing the piece that says “we’re still here but with better branding” while everyone who actually gave a shit about the old one is off doing podcasts or selling their Substacks to crypto bros. The internet doesn’t mourn. It pivots.
The Rebrand That Wasn’t Optional
FansWeek didn’t close. It didn’t fold. Nobody sent a cease and desist or a going-out-of-business liquidation notice. What happened is far more banal — the publication simply decided that “FansWeek” sounded like a fanzine your cousin printed on a Xerox machine in 2004, and “PressBeat” sounds like something you’d find at a conference nobody asked to attend but everyone will show up to anyway.
“We wanted a name that reflects where we’re going, not where we’ve been,” said an unnamed creative consultant who was definitely not brought in for this but will receive credit anyway. “PressBeat signals movement. Energy. It’s what you’d call the rhythmic pulse of modern journalism if you were a venture capitalist describing your morning routine.”
What Actually Changed
Everything and nothing. Same writer. Same voice. Same relentless urge to point out that nobody reads journalism the way they think they do — which is to say, with attention, rather than as background noise while they microwave something they’ll only half-eat. The domain changed. The URL is different now. Google has already indexed it, which means the algorithm will suggest it beside articles from publications whose editorial standards haven’t been questioned since 1987.
My sister Ami still writes on fansweek.org, apparently under the assumption that tradition is a shield against irrelevance. She lectures on manners like some kind of Victorian customs officer, and I respect that deeply — in the way you respect a person who still iron’s their socks. Some people need structure. I need a domain that doesn’t sound like a support group.
PressBeat is up. The content is here. The dead horse has been flogged, rebranded, and sent back out with a new business card. So come read it, or don’t. The internet keeps spinning either way, and honestly — that’s the joke we never stopped telling.
That’s all from today: from Paris, I’m Jessica Carter-Wilson.