A New Era for On the Bleachers

Recently on social media I have been teasing a "major announcement" pushing the end to a mystery that only few people know about at this point. The reason that only a handful of people know about what the announcement is based on the fact that they are involved in the project. But after months of hard work I think it's time to finally explain what exactly we have been working on and why. Basically following the end of On the Bleachers as a website I decided that we could move everyone over to blogger just to allow both OTB to continue and give those who still wanted to write the opportunity to do so. Now I did bring the OTB_WWE to my wrestling site, but that's just because it was easier for me to have her go there instead of here as it would help me. Either way though we getting away from the point a little while after the new OTB started I found a way to put together a magazine where it wouldn't be super expensive.

From there I got on sending DM's to the former writers to try and get an idea on how many people would be interested in writing about sports in a magazine. Surprisingly a decent number of people were interested in writing and though it was a little much at first it got easier once I took it one thing at a time. I wrote a number of articles to balance out the others that my fellow writers came up with but with me writing it was difficult to give much direction to those who needed some help and it suffered. But things changed and in reality started to snowball once I got my articles done and could start to focus on other things and now we see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Before I continue let me explain something as some of you might be wondering why I just picked a random assortment of people to help with the magazine instead of having a process. The reason for that is I wanted this magazine to be "For fans by Fans" rather than written by someone with an opinion clouded by fame or a pro sports team breathing over their shoulder. Even though in some cases the opinion might be biased, but the passion and knowledge will be there and that is sometimes more important. The reality of it is that if you peak someone's interest and have the right people getting behind a project anything can work even if the odds are stacked against you.

Overall I put this together as a way to keep OTB going and really fix the poor job I did of running it as a website before it got too expensive. Admittedly I'll say that this is a lot of work, but seeing the final project as something that other people could read and learn from will be well worth the hard work. As one thing I have learned writing on the internet the last few years is that if one person gives you a chance it is extremely humbling and an incredible feeling because that means one person cared what you have to say. I am very excited about this magazine and I am extremely thankful that I have found people who share my vision of what it could be, it's just a matter of what we will be next after issue number one.