Photo By Terri Hodges.
Bonnie Burton is no longer with Lucasfilm and StarWars.com. The company has laid her off, she announced today on Twitter.
Bonnie wrote content for the website and handled social media. She was hired in 2003, during the run-up to Revenge of the Sith, and has been an outspoken force for women in the fandom ever since.
We’re a little puzzled by this move on the part of Lucasfilm, but no one is doubting that Bonnie will land on her feet somewhere!
This seems like the next steps in their move to not really generate any actual content (besides video) for StarWars.com
Booooo :(
I actually gasped. That is very lame. :(
Disappointing to hear. Best of luck to her.
It’s real sad the way StarWars.com is these days. Laying off Bonnie is another wrong direction.
Is it just me being mad or is Lucasfilm really tossing out everything fan-related?
Steve Sansweet left Lucasfilm without any replacement. He was the “offline” contact of the fandom.
Sue Rostoni left Lucas Books. She was a very vocal and caring person, when it comes to monitoring and answering fan questions regarding the Expanded Universe. She has a replacement, but I haven’t heard very much about the replacement.
Now, Lucasfilm has laid off Bonnie Burton. She was the online contact with the fandom.
All this, combined with George Lucas’ recent comments regarding the fandom, lets me ask one question: “Quo vadis, Lucasfilm?” Do you really want to bury Star Wars? Sometimes, it feels exactly like that.
Have known about this for a few weeks (as I suspect Dunc has) but still, so sad to read, and heartwarming to see the outpouring of affection for Bonnie.
Agree, not quite sure where this is all going. I know a bit about what’s happening behind the scenes, and have my own conclusions and ideas about where LFL are taking all of this, but until they push the button it’s all up in the air.
I’m not trying to sound alarmist, but in a way things are starting to remind me of the mid-’80s, when LFL seemed quite content to put SW on the back burner for a while. Honestly, it’s amazing SW has remained so prominent for the last several years–it seems to have had more of a life post-prequel trilogy than it did post-original trilogy.
Not surprising, since that life is mostly driven by online activities. Even offline fan organisations – yes, that’s the stormtrooper guys – were built online and would have come apart long since without the possibility to present themselves on the internet.
Which makes it all the weirder that LFL would fire one of its most vocal and recognized online voices. Okay, they may think that thanks to facebook they are in constant contact with the fans either way, but that doesn’t mean that you can continue on without somebody to push the medium and actually do something. And Bonnie did that brilliantly, imo. Very bad move by LFL.
It is very odd that while every company out there is actually trying to increase their social media presence, that LFL would get rid of a respected social media expert. StarWars.com has sadly transitioned into a weak fan site, not the go-to destination for all things Star Wars that it used to be.
There may be something to the comments above about LFL wanting to scale back how much Star Wars they are throwing out. It is definitely at a pretty high level, considering we haven’t had a new movie since 2008. I could see them wanting to scale back a bit.
Sucks.
Laying off such a GREAT rep for Star Wars is beyond understanding. I had the pleasure of meeting Bonnie at a con. She is pretty much the coolest person around & when you meet her, you feel even more connected to SW. She’s a RockStar that LOVES to iteract with the fans…LucasFilms & StarWars.com have lost an icon. Best of luck, Bonnie!
If this is supposed to be a part of Lucasfilm scaling back STAR WARS, I can’t tell. Hasbro is still milking the franchise with more repetitive figures. Celebration VI is this year, and has been built up more than the last one or two, and the Clone Wars is at the peak of its popularity. Perhaps the fifth season will be the last, but this just looks to me like some penny-pinching budget crunching even though it seems Lucasfilm wouldn’t need to do that.
Whoa, Sansweet and Sue are gone too? What the actual frak, LFL.
Well, there is one key difference: Steve and Sue both retired.
It seems like LFL is working hard to outright dismantle its online presence. It started with the site revamp that simultaneously removed untold amounts of content and marked the end of their forums, which had been TPTB’s primary means of keeping in touch with fandom. Then they announced the imminent deletion of their blogs (admittedly, they’ve been quite moribund since the end of Hyperspace, though that’s another online thing they killed off …). Then they put the official blog on hiatus, and laid off their key social media guru. Other than their farmed-out main webpage, their self-removal from the web is almost complete.
This seems less like a bunch of isolated bad ideas, and more like the near-culmination of a BIG bad idea.
Removal, yes… But at the same time the Facebook presence of anything officially Star Wars has pretty much quadrupled: Del Rey is pretty active over there, and so are Dark Horse, Her Universe and other licensees. The only one missing from the picture is LFL, and let’s be realistic: We never got anything from them anyway (“LFL does not comment on… Please refer to…”).
So yes, TOS continues to exist only a TCW marketing tool which lays more or less dormant in the six month where there is no new TCW, but other than that the losses aren’t quite as devastating as they would have been pre-Facebook.
That doesn’t make the Bonnie decision any less stinkawhiff (to throw in a little Jar Jar), but the overall concept isn’t quite as suicidal as it may appear to be. ;-)