Site Announcement on Recruiting and the Future of OurDailyBears

About six months ago, I did a post on April Fool's Day about the Future of OurDailyBears wherein I turned over management of the blog to Peter and rode off into the sunset (mostly because he supposedly banned me).  It was a joke that a lot of people didn't get as a joke immediately, but everybody had a lot of fun with once they did.

Today is not a joke, but I'm also not announcing my retirement from the blog.  Instead, I wanted to take the opportunity at the start of a bye week to announce a couple of changes on the blog designed to capitalize on the tremendous success of the last few months (easily our best ever) and keep things moving in a positive direction.  Just to let you know, we had more pageviews in the last 30 days than the entire first year of the blog.

Here's how we're going to keep going:

First, I've officially promoted Peter to co-Manager of the blog with an eye that he might assist with some of the day-to-day management I've handled to this point.  Peter was instrumental in getting the Podcast off the ground and cares deeply about the future of ODB, just as I do.  He's going to do a wonderful job going forward and has my complete trust.

Before you freak out: I'm not retiring from the blog nor is the blog closing down.  If that's what you were hoping to see, tough!  This blog is as much an outlet for me as it is a home for you, and though they may yet pry it from my cold dead hands some day, today is not that day.

Second, I'm reopening recruitment for contributor positions.  We did this in late May and got an overwhelming number of responses, some of which I, to my immense regret, never responded to.  I can't apologize enough for that.  If you emailed me then about contributing and I never got back to you, and you're still interested now, please do so again so we can talk about it.  There's a lot of good information in the link above about the type of writer/contributor we're looking for, though our needs have changed a little bit since then.  What we're looking for now is mostly contributors interested in writing about football, basketball, and recruiting (for both sports).

The big change between now and then as far as recruiting is that our recent growth gives me the opportunity to offer limited monthly stipends for writers should that be necessary.  I don't want to oversell things there because, as I've said, nobody is getting rich off the blogging game, but we can talk about it.

Third, seriously, check out that link above about recruiting.  Basically everything there still applies.

I can't thank everyone here enough for the community we've managed to build over the last three years.  There have been points where I've seriously considered stepping away completely only to realize how much I'd miss it, and you guys are the reason why.  We're going to keep kicking butt and taking names here as we try to build the best free Baylor site on the web.

Sic 'em, Bears.