Hey, everyone. You’ve probably heard most of this by now, but figured we should put it up here just to be sure.
Today, Vox Media laid off about seven percent of its workforce, and in the process shuttered a number of its team sites here at SBNation. We learned this morning that among those shuttered were going to be most of the NHL sites, and ours here at Broad Street Hockey is one of them. We will no longer be receiving funding for our site as of the end of February.
First and foremost: Steph Driver, who in addition to being in charge of this site here oversaw all of SBN’s NHL coverage, was among that seven percent of people laid off from their roles at Vox, and she is no longer with the site here at BSH. This, for more reasons than we can articulate, is pretty tough for us to swallow. Steph has done a tremendous job ever since a) coming over to join us here in 2016 to get the current version of BSH Radio off the ground and b) taking over as the boss both here at BSH and for SBN NHL as a whole when Travis Hughes departed both roles in 2018. Also, she’s a great friend to all of us. If you’re reading this and have a chance to hire her for something, you should absolutely do that. We will miss her more than we can possibly express for … however long this all continues.
On that note, we are still figuring out a lot of things. Such as:
- How we are going to handle the next month and change until our funding runs out
- What happens to the site once our funding runs out
- What we’ll do once that happens
- What it means for BSH Radio/
And probably pretty much every other question you may have about it. At this point, we don’t know a ton else that hasn’t already been written above. As we learn more, we’ll tell you more.
We will do our proper goodbyes in due time as it’s necessary, but for now, we want to say thank you for spending this time with us, however much it was. This site is on its fifteenth season talking about this team, and whether you’ve been here from the very beginning or came on recently, we’re thankful for everyone who’s ever taken the time to hear or read what we have to say. We’re also extremely thankful for the other sites in the SBN network, whose excellent work has made us better at what we do and whose closings today are also a gut punch to us.
You’ll hear from us again soon. (Maybe not tomorrow. Be honest, you were not going to be paying attention to the Flyers tomorrow night anyways. Go Birds.) Until then, it’s been fun.
