Welcome to the Future
Welcome to Loud City is live on Substack
The last few months have been a bit of whirlwind. On the 20th of January, I was told that Welcome to Loud City would no longer receive funding from Vox Media - SB Nation and that my contract would be cancelled at the end of March.
It was a body blow to hear that news, I took the site over in August 2022 with the goal of bringing WTLC back to glory after a difficult few years. To find out five months later that the rug was being pulled out from under my feet was painful.
It hurt quite a lot as Welcome to Loud City has been a formative part of the Thunder blogosphere since the team’s inception in 2008. Over those fifteen years, a warm-hearted community of fans from all across the world gathered on this one website to discuss their basketball team, the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Welcome to Loud City is a broad church for all fans to come and talk ball, it is one of the reasons why I love this community so much. I started watching basketball in 2016 and immediately fell in love with the Thunder.
The first series I ever watched was the 2016 Western Conference Finals, a modern seven-game classic between the Thunder and Warriors. I knew very little then but was drawn to Russell Westbrook. Westbrook is polarising but I loved the intensity with which he played the game.
Russ made me a Thunder fan but Welcome to Loud City was my education. I enjoyed watching the team but did not know really anything else about Oklahoma except for the musical. I started my education on WTLC and fell even deeper in love.
This was a team snake-bitten by injury with one final shot at defining at era, this was an elite team built in a small market without no major free agency additions with guys who got shit done. The Thunder’s fearlessness appealed to me and then suddenly it was all over in a blink. Oklahoma City lost Game 7, Durant left town for the Bay and the team looked to be finished.
Again, it came down to Russell Westbrook. Against all the odds, he chose to stay and planted his flag deep into the Oklahoma soil. That moment alone made him legend but the season that followed was nothing short of spectacular.
Westbrook’s 2016-17 is a testament to sheer bloody will. He dragged an ill-fitting team to the playoffs behind a record-breaking number of triple-doubles and impressive clutch scoring. Orlando, Dallas and then finally Denver, a run of three improbable, impossible game-winners that still seem surreal.
I was a diehard fan and liked sharing my opinion on the Thunder. My writings got me noticed and I was added to the staff at WTLC midway during the 2019-20 season. As time went on, Welcome to Loud City became my home within the Thunder community and when the site was defunded by Vox - SB Nation, I was concerned.
I care deeply about WTLC and that care has only grown since I stepped up into the Editor in Chief role. It would have been gut-wrenching to watch this community get torn asunder due to budgetary cuts. We had to keep Welcome to Loud City alive and Substack was the best option.
Substack has allowed Welcome to Loud City to move away from ad-littered webpages to a distraction-free site that is community-supported and free to make it’s own decisions. There are no members of the brass here telling us to write short, thin stories to satisfy SEO requirements. Welcome to Loud City is by the fans and for the fans.
Welcome to Loud City is a community, a collective and as such we need support from the community to keep this website independent and alive. If enough people subscribe, we will have the ability to really drill down into the Thunder and craft stories that more than meet their mark.