SCoC, and recent developments regarding SBNation’s NHL coverage
We’re not dead yet.
www.stanleycupofchowder.com
Hey. We gotta make this official since the rest of the SBN-NHL sphere has done so, so here’s where it stands.
Today, we learned that Vox was cutting about 7% of it’s staff, which roughly translated to about 95% of the NHL Staff, and pretty much all of the MLS team as well. 28 blogs will officially no longer receive Vox support and monetary compensation for their coverage of teams, leaving six left full time.
Stanley Cup Of Chowder is one of those six.
As for the reasons we were spared, we don’t have any. Your guess is as good as ours. Maybe our overhead was just low enough that it didn’t warrant it. Maybe our press pass makes SBN look good. We’re not getting answers, and I don’t think we ever will. But we are alive. For now, anyway.
Our hearts break of course for those who were affected; many of whom we worked closely with, like those working at Eyes on the Prize or Pension Plan Puppets or Raw Charge or Litter Box Cats or Silver Sens. I’m especially gutted for The Ice Garden, which took a great many disparate women’s hockey writers and consolidated some of the best minds on that particular part of our sport into one easy to read location. It’s borderline criminal what’s happened to them and to marginalized and often forgotten communities like Five For Howling, the California blogs, On The Forecheck serve. It’s insane that robust drivers of content should be chosen to shut down, like Broad St. Hockey or Blueshirt Banter. But it is the way of things
The hockey internet, analysis, and culture will be far worse for this having happened, and we wish them a safe and quick landing on their feet, whatever form that takes.
SBNation.com Communities
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Vox Media Layoffs Wipe Out Most SB Nation Hockey, MLS Sites | Defector
On Friday morning, Vox Media, which owns SB Nation, The Verge, Eater, Polygon, and New York Magazine, along with Group Nine brands like The Dodo, PopSugar, and Thrillist, announced it would be laying off seven percent of its workers, about 130 employees. The dust has yet to settle on this round...
defector.com
The workers who run the SB Nation team sites are mostly independent contractors, meaning they make only small stipends for what can amount to a full-time job. Many of them have been doing the work of building fan communities for years for little or no money.
Steph Driver was the only full-time SB Nation hockey staffer before she was laid off today. Driver oversaw all of SB Nation's 34 hockey team sites, one for each NHL team, as well as one site each for women's hockey and college hockey. Driver said she and the other team-site workers have pieced together through self-reporting that there are six hockey sites left, the managers of whom feel conflicted about continuing their work when so many of their coworkers have been terminated.
"We feel like we've been punched in the gut today," Driver told Defector.
The team-site layoffs are especially hard for workers to stomach given how little money they cost Vox Media. The cost of the hockey sites combined was pennies compared to the company's billion-dollar valuation.
"The smaller sites were making between $200 and $500 a month to spread between the site manager and some of the contributors, and on the higher end of the scale, our big sites would have anywhere between $2,500 and $4,000 to spend on contributors," Driver said.
