Before I get into anything else, I’d like to first and foremost thank Alfie with his continued commitment to the Big Cat Country site and to the Jaguars community as a whole. Alfie has taken this website from a mere AltaVista.com to the Bing.com of Jaguars blogging. With that, I sincerely thank Alfie for his hard work over the last several years and wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors.
So, in the coming days, I’ll post more information about me and my background, but for starters, I feel necessary to address my vision for Big Cat Country. With the support of our readers and commenters, I believe BCC can make that jump from the Bing.com to the Google.com of Jaguars blogging. I hope for BCC to become the only site that Jaguars fans come to for news, information, and analysis.
In order to support a jump to the next level, we need to take a look at what’s holding back this site from greatness. Back in mid-February, I wrote an article outlining how Big Cat Country lacked basic decorum. Certain menaces have decided to treat this community as their personal tumblr of perversion and bad taste. Change is necessary to make that jump to the next level. Here are the immediate changes that I will implement:
- Create a minimum level of acceptable editorial standards. I’m not taking this time to point fingers, but it’s well overdue that BCC needs some defined levels of editorial standards. The non-existent standards of past created a culture of childish mischief. I will nominate several of our top fan post contributors to join me on an editorial standards board to define what is acceptable and what is not acceptable for this site.
- Cultivate a culture of community. There will be no toleration of bullying on BCC; not from the commenters and especially not from the site admins. We are here to discuss the serious business of sports blogging. If everyone’s opinions are not valued, then no one’s opinion are truly valued.
- Amnesty for the wronged. It’s no secret that many have been blocked from BCC. I feel as though many were wrongly denied access to this site based on having a dissenting opinion. In order to cultivate a culture of community, I will reinstate the commenting rights to anyone who have been blocked and would like to join in on the conversation. Just @ me on twitter and I will gladly give you the second chance that you deserve.
- End the Spanish Language Commentary section. Back in mid-February, I have had enough with the antics of the SLC section. As of this morning, UncleChaps and BurritoBrosShits no longer have access to post articles on the front page. I did not revoke their access to Fan Posts, so they are still welcome to join in on the conversation, as long as they keep a respectable level of professionalism.
I hope these new changes will be to your liking. I am confident that we will build something great here.
I know your next question, “what will happen to the existing staff?” Well, I assure you that the existing set of contributors will continue working hard on providing quality content to the BCC community. I spoke with Adam Stites this morning. I asked Adam to take a reduced role on the site from here on out. Adam will focus only on breaking news and aggregating other news that comes through the wire. I will be looking for new contributors to take over the analysis part of Adam’s job, so if you are interested, feel free to leave a comment below and I will get back with you.
If you follow me on twitter, you know that I recently quit my job. In fact, I was taking this job. Over the last several weeks, I’ve been working closely with the SBNation staff in Washington DC on various training and discussion the future strategy for the site. I am proud to be an SBNation employee and look forward to my relationship with this media outlet.
Feel free to follow me on Twitter @JagsTom. I look forward to having you join the conversation. I know we can create the community that we all look for.
GO JAGUARS!