What’s Next for Clips Nation

In case you hadn’t noticed, content has been rather light on Clips Nation the past few days - lighter than it’s been in years, as a matter of fact. For those who aren’t aware of the cause, check out Lucas’ post on Medium from Monday regarding SB Nation’s effective shutdown of Clips Nation and the sudden laying off of the entire Clips Nation staff.

The past couple days, as one might have guessed, have been pretty tough. Most of our staff have been on the site for years and dedicated a great deal of time to Clips Nation. Lucas and I have each published over 1,000 posts on CN, and having our time with this site cut short so suddenly has been both shocking and rather devastating. This community has meant so much to me over the past decade, the formative years of my life, and losing that with no warning has been unpleasant to say the least. I will publish a more formal goodbye later, but accepting the fact that my time with this iteration of the site is coming to an end has been a difficult process over the last few days.

The weird element is that, as Lucas said in his letter, SB Nation has asked us to continue in our current roles until the end of March while they work through this transition. While we hope to provide the citizens of Clips Nation with a new, independent home before that deadline, Lucas and I have decided to resume publishing content on Clips Nation in the meantime. Our roles will be somewhat different (we can post a maximum of 35 posts before leaving, which I’ve cranked out in a single month before) than they had been before, but we are still on the site staff as contractors.

This was a dilemma: do we publish content (and produce revenue) for a corporation that clearly doesn’t value us (and never has, really) and carry on as close to normal as possible, or cut things off? Lucas and I have put a lot of thought into this, and we agree: while it’s extremely difficult to keep writing for Vox, we want to keep providing content for our readers and, more importantly, maintain a space for our community to come together and talk about the Clippers. Therefore, we will be resuming coverage in the days to come, albeit with the restrictions mentioned above (we can probably only post a couple times per week). The Lob, The Jam, The Podcast will also continue on its normal schedule for the time being.

While I know that many of you have sworn off SB Nation (and we appreciate your support), we hope that you’ll hang out with us until it’s time to turn out the lights.

As content resumes on Clips Nation this weekend, we are working on building a new, better, independent place where our community will be able to hang out, chat, and follow our work when Vox Media kills Clips Nation in a few months. However, until our new home is ready, we will continue to write content on here, maybe churn out a few podcasts, and retain, at least in part, the spirit of Clips Nation.

Lucas Hann contributed to this post.