Well, we made it. Here we are at the new home of Broad Street Hockey. It has been a wild few months since Vox told us they were kicking us to the curb, and when it happened we weren’t sure where we’d end up. Or how we’d get there.
But here we are, because of all of you.
To start, thank you so much for your support. From kind words to GoFundMe donations to retweets to comments on the old site, it was clear from the jump that our community was too strong to be taken down by a bunch of corporate dorks who don’t think hockey has any value. We, quite literally, would not be here right now without the support of all of you. Thank you. A million times, thank you.
And now this site belongs to us. We plan to bring you interesting, thoughtful, fun, and valuable content about the Flyers (and other things too!) as we move forward on our own. But without the platform Vox provided us, we have bills to pay now. And we’d like to pay our writers more than the pittance we received from SB Nation, if we can. And that’s why we’ve had to move forward on this little adventure with a partial paywall in tow. It’s not something we WANT to do, believe me. I would love nothing more than to make this site free for all of you; and heck, if this all goes well enough maybe someday some big sponsor will come along and we CAN make it free for all of you! But for now, as we start, we need the support of the community to keep this thing alive. None of us are getting rich here, I promise you. Some of us (hi) are working for free. So if you can support us, please know how much we appreciate you. And how hard we are going to work to make this worth your while.
However, for the month of April, all of the content on the site will be free. We’re considering it to be a tryout of sorts for us. After that, we will be offering a sale on memberships through the summer, allowing you to get in on the ground floor at a discount.
Now, on to the business details, in case you missed our posts over on the old site:
Today is a bit of a soft launch for the New BSH. Some things may not work perfectly or look perfect, but we’re a work in progress. And I appreciate you being patient with us as we get off the ground. Right now, Vox is preparing the transfer of all of the IP to me so that we can integrate it here, on the new site. You may notice that there are just a few old articles here so far; it’s going to take about a week for all of the archives to be imported on to the new site. So you may encounter some dead links and dead ends for a bit, and I’m sorry for that. But it will be a temporary problem.
We’ll likely be tweaking the look of the site in small ways as we go, finding out better ways to do things as we use the site. If you have suggestions, I’d love to hear them so please don’t hesitate to share.
All of the photos we used on our articles at the Old BSH were licensed to us by Getty, and that license can’t be transferred. That means all of the old articles will be without photos. Sorry if it looks a little janky that way, but it’s just the way it has to be.
Thankfully, we are lucky enough to have the support of the incredibly talented Heather Barry, who has agreed to license her archives to us. That means we’ll have great photos to choose from as we move forward, which is an amazing luxury. Heather, we can’t thank you enough for working with us.
You also may have noticed that we have a new logo now. We thought it was important to make something that is our own as we move forward, but with nods to the original logo that we’ve had since the beginning. It was designed by our own Megan O’Halloran, another insanely talented person we are lucky to have in our corner. Eventually we will have a store here on the site and if you’d like to buy something with our logo, you’ll be able to! I personally can’t wait to get myself a nice big coffee mug. Love a big coffee mug. So yeah, here we are.
Welcome home, friends. We can’t wait to build something amazing with you.
