A Quick Blueshirt Banter Update (And a survey we’d like you to take)

Jan 23, 2023 - 1:08 PM

To our loyal community,

I just want to start by saying the amount of people who have reached out to me to try and help keep this place going, express concern about myself and the writers, tell me how much they love this place, and talking about how horrific Vox is for all of this means more to me than you guys will ever know.

Friday was a really difficult day for a lot of reasons, and you all made it much better.

This update isn’t much of an update in terms of logistics, but it’s an update that’s pretty critical.

In case my Friday quick blurb on what was happening confused you guys, let me just make this clear: We’re not dead.

I’m not sure if we’ll be here anymore, and I’m not sure if we’ll be Blueshirt Banter anymore — both of those things are almost assuredly ending at the end of February — but we’re not leaving.

I have been with this website since 2008, Mike has been with us since 2009, and Tom has been here since 2014. Some of you guys have been with us as long as I’ve been here (I came in two weeks after the site was born). This community might be moving, but we’re not going anywhere.

As of right now we’re weighing out all our options, and there likely won’t be an update on the where or how for a couple of weeks. I expect this place to continue to hum as it always has through the February 28th cutoff date, but we’re not going anywhere.

For now I ask that you trust the process and have a little patience as we work it out. When we know what the next steps are we will let you know. It might include us asking you guys to be part of a paid system where you help keep things afloat.

That said, please take the below survey and let us know your thoughts to help us gauge how to move forward:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdM1Z5L-HRE2vatK23tlXez4TYG4tNVc98rio5PcQ0v9j7QgA/viewform?usp=sf_link

(For the record, we’re not sure if/how going to a paid service would work. We’re just trying to see if it would be possible to make this happen to keep writers on for what they were making currently. It might not be a monthly subscription, this is just a way for us to get a ballpark.)