Welcome to Canes Country: The Day After

Well hello there. My name is Brian, I talk about the reasons you’re going to be late for work as my day job, and I have the unenviable task of following Bob as the head honcho here at Canes Country. No pressure, right?

As by now you’ve likely seen, Bob is riding off into the sunset starting his own blog, for which we will forever give him the Voldemort treatment and you will never hear his name again. (Just kidding; one of the perks of being the emeritus managing editor is an open standing invitation to opine whenever the mood strikes, so you have likely not seen the last of him.) The SBN bigwigs have asked me to step in to mind the shop, so here I am.

You likely saw the help-wanted post that we had up for a few weeks back in July and early August. The response was overwhelming; we had twenty-five people express an interest in writing for Canes Country. Between that, the fact that Bob and I were both on vacation for a few weeks, and the behind the scenes transition going on at the top of the masthead, it took way too long to go through the applications. If you applied and haven’t heard anything yet, I sincerely apologize for the amount of time it has taken. You will hear something by the end of next week, one way or another.

Over the next few weeks, we plan to roughly quadruple our writing staff. We are going to have people dedicated to specific beats: game previews, recaps, short-form in-game #content (gifs, vines, and the like), people dedicated to the Checkers and prospect coverage, and much, much more. With that in mind, there are a few introductions and announcements I’d like to make this morning.

First, if you haven’t noticed, SB Nation has implemented new community guidelines that are effective across all SBN blogs. We are also going to add our own supplemental guidelines over the next couple of weeks, to ensure that Canes Country remains the best Canes blog anywhere. I will make a further announcement when we’re ready to roll out the Canes Country supplemental guidelines, but please take a look at the new SBN guidelines and understand that further commenting on any Canes Country post indicates your acceptance of these new guidelines.

We’ve also reworked the job descriptions of our remaining contributors. Jamie Kellner (Follow @jbkellner) is now going to serve in the newly-created position of community manager and senior editor. She will be responsible for all of Canes Country’s social media outreach - more on that below - and is also going to serve as the chief comment moderator and supervisor of the comment moderation staff. Jamie will not be writing quite as much as before, but she will still chip in occasionally with previews, recaps and the like. Her Phoblographer role will not change; you’ll still see her work at the top of a good number of our articles.

The other two remaining writers, Kyle Morton (Follow @PuckHeadKyle914) and Craig Johnson (NotOpie) (Follow @cwjohnson23), are going to remain on the writing staff as senior writers. In their role as senior writers, Kyle and Craig will be writers-at-large who don’t have a specific beat that they cover, but will fill in where necessary in multiple areas of coverage. They will also continue to contribute their excellent analysis and features that they have done so well in the recent past.

I’m super excited that Jamie, Kyle and Craig are all hanging around. They are wonderful assets to Canes Country and it’s exciting to be able to reward their hard work with these well-deserved new roles.

There are two more new contributors who are joining the CC staff - one you will see, and one you probably won’t. Brett Finger (Follow @brettfinger) is also joining the writing staff as a senior writer along with Kyle and Craig. Brett is the former editor of Cardiac Cane at Fansided, and has contributed to The Hockey Writers over the past few months. He is a journalism major at the University of Arizona and I’m very excited to welcome him to the staff. He did some great work at Cardiac Cane and I’m looking forward to seeing his contributions to Canes Country.

Danielle Pattee (NbrAska) (Follow @NbrAska) is going to serve as our copy editor, a position we’ve never had before and one we’ve desperately needed. Danielle is an production editor in her day job, and I was beyond thrilled when she offered to volunteer her expertise to benefit Canes Country. You won’t see Danielle’s byline at the top of any stories, but her fingerprints are going to be all over the place on our site. Our writing quality, SEO positioning and readability, while already very good, is going to do nothing but improve with Danielle on the team, and I can’t wait to see how we evolve with her input on our content.

Bob is going to keep his existing @CanesCountry Twitter account, albeit with a new handle in the next week or so. In the meantime, I encourage you to follow @CanesCntrySBN (Follow @CanesCntrySBN), our new official Twitter account, that will henceforth be tweeting out not just links to stories but also interacting and providing pithy commentary. Our Facebook page will remain the same, so give us a Like over there as well. We hope to expand our social media offerings over the next few months (full disclosure: I am old, and I cannot figure out the appeal of Snapchat, but I hear the kids love it), so stay tuned for more details as we get closer to the start of the season.

Please join me in congratulating Jamie, Craig, Kyle, Brett and Danielle in their new roles. We will have further announcements of more additions to the writing staff over the next couple of weeks, and should be good to go with everything by the time the Canes’ season starts in Winnipeg just over a month from now.

If you ever need anything or have a question, my inbox is always open: bdleblanc at gmail, or find me on Twitter (Follow @bdleblanc). Thanks, as always, for your continued support of Canes Country, and we look forward to continuing to be the premier Hurricanes blog anywhere on the interwebs.