Bonnie Burton Laid Off From Lucasfilm

[lazypadawan]

Bonnie Burton Tweeted today that she has lost her job at Lucasfilm after working there nine years. She was one of the content editors of starwars.com and wrote or co-wrote a couple of books having do to with arts and crafts. Burton posted a lot of crafts projects on starwars.com and the blog. She did all of the fan "celeb" interviews. She was also heavily involved with running prior Celebrations.

I knew something was up when the blog was "suspended" recently for "renovations." According to some replies to Bonnie's Tweet, she had known for at least a couple of weeks she was losing her job.

There seems to be an awful lot of downsizing going with Lucasfilm and Star Wars lately. As previously noted, Steve Sansweet retired as Fan Relations guy and nobody replaced him. The Shop closed last year. Hyperspace was shut down. Content is pretty sparse these days if you can find it with starwars.com's damnable navigation. Maybe the lousy economy has affected Lucasfilm's bottom line and they're cutting costs like everyone else. Maybe this is just changing the team once put together to promote new movies, which we aren't getting anymore. Maybe they want to change the tone of "official" fandom and go in another direction (look for my coming rant, "Why Star Wars Needs To Renounce Geek Culture"). Oh who am I kidding?

There were things Burton did and others at starwars.com did that I didn't like and maybe things did need some shaking up. But I also know she was responsive to fans and it must really, really SUCK to not only lose your job but lose a job anyone would kill to get. Lots of luck to her in the future.

Comments

[phantommenaceholiday (from livejournal.com)]

Yeah, curious things going on at LFL these days. I wonder if they're going to farm stuff out to another company?

I already agree with your coming rant, and all I have to go on is the title--can't wait to read it!

[lazypadawan.livejournal.com]

It's entirely possible they're going to contract out. Or, they're going with cheaper and less original content for starwars.com

[krpalmer.livejournal.com]

This does give a sense of a piece added to the puzzle, even if there are still dark uncertainties about what the full picture will look like. After all the fulminations from particular corners about how "the fans will surely be driven away now," though, I would almost want to be leery of wondering about "Lucasfilm's bottom line"... although it might be something if that was happening and nobody knew about it. Anyway, it's bad news for those laid off regardless.

The title also sounds intriguing to me. I did wonder a bit about the etiquette of where to post responses, but the discussion has already started here (and the "crosspost" message is now on Dreamwidth, something I hadn't looked into myself...)

[lazypadawan.livejournal.com]

Respond in either place. The bigger changes will happen when my paid account expires at the end of November.

[pronker]

I was in Target today and a 2 year old pointed at a greeting card and said, 'Yoda!' There's a lot of product recognition out there, a huge upwelling of knowledge that so many have from literally the crib - I'm sorry Burton is gone, as she's a cute person and creative in her work. She's the fun sort of gal they need.