Navigating the Hudson

John Baney explores how Hudson River Blue survived the Vox shutdown and became the definitive daily for New York City FC.

Sometimes, it’s easy for die-hard fans to forget that soccer still has a long way to go in this country and city - both on and off the field.

It’s natural to get swept up in another Christian Pulisic stunner in Milan, or in rumors about which top clubs Weston McKennie and Giovanni Reyna might join next, or in articles about how good Cavan Sullivan is supposed to be. Depending on which echo chamber you inhabit, it can be easy to think that the United States is en route to becoming a true player in the global footballing landscape.

Then, in an instant, the United States Men’s National Team (USMNT) loses two games in four days to Panama and Uruguay, and we’re back to being the laughing stock we’ve so desperately sought to avoid on the global stage. Suddenly, the talking heads of ESPN and Fox Sports are laying into our beloved boys, jingoistically questioning how countries with such small populations could beat the all-powerful USA in anything. 

It feels like a fever dream to see Colin Cowherd lambast Gregg Berhalter on national TV for his lack of tactical acumen. Even though his points are valid, it is frustrating to hear them from someone like Cowherd, because legacy media figures like him weren’t along for the ride with the rest of the soccer community. Unless it’s a head-turning event like a World Cup, big sports media tends to turn their collective back on soccer in this country. That’s just how it is.

But, that doesn’t mean the nonstop, 24/7, social-media-addicted coverage we see in other American sports doesn’t exist in soccer. Rather, it means the market is filled by a different supplier: independent media. Across the country, an army of beat writers, Twitter warriors, and photographers are on site with boots on the ground, janky Amazon-purchased recording setups in hand, and coveted credentials proudly displayed around their necks to provide fans with news, content, and storylines for their favorite teams.

In the great City of New York, and more specifically for New York City Football Club, two independent soccer outlets have separated themselves from the pack in terms of quality, consistency, and popularity amongst local fans: The Outfield, and Hudson River Blue (HRB).

Funny enough, while you’re reading this on The Outfield, the subject of this piece is HRB. It’s a collaboration of epic proportions, of levels usually reserved for Drake bringing random celebrities out on stage, or those nostalgic Disney Channel crossover episodes from the mid-2000s.

Regular readers of The Outfield have likely heard of HRB. But who are they exactly, and what are they all about?

“Our tagline is: ‘A New York Soccer Community,’” said Oliver Strand, Executive Editor of HRB. “In the past, we said, ‘A New York City FC Soccer Community’, but I want us to be a bit broader. I want us to include lower league teams, I want us to include women’s teams, I want us to include NYCFC II, and just for it to be a New York perspective on the whole world of soccer.”

Strand took over the platform in 2021 and has been at the helm ever since. As an Executive Editor, he has to wear two hats: leading all editorial content and managing the business components. “There’s an expectation for you to do a lot of work. If you’re the executive editor, it comes down to you,” Strand explained. “You find yourself writing a lot on weekends and at night.”

Unlike the typical college student, Strand isn't burning the midnight oil because he's procrastinating; he, like many in the independent soccer media industry, has primary career responsibilities outside of HRB. Since 2005, he's been a professional writer with an impressive portfolio that includes work for The New York Times, Time Out, Condé Nast, Vogue, and other publications. Despite this, Strand has been instrumental in the publication's ability to produce consistent daily content, whether it’s a game recap, opposition research, instant reaction, player rating, or transfer rumor.

While Strand ensures a high volume of posts, he prioritizes legitimacy and responsible journalism over clickbait and rumors. “We want to be a resource,” Strand declared. “We want to be a news source. We want to be an archive. We want to explain things clearly.”

This approach has made HRB the definitive daily for New York City FC, with major media platforms like The Guardian, MLSSoccer.com, The Athletic, and ESPN.com citing its work. How does a site run entirely on a part-time basis, and that until recently only covered New York City FC, find itself cited by some of the biggest outlets in soccer journalism? What better place to start than with the founder Raf Naboa y Rivera.

“I’m a professional storyteller,” Naboa y Rivera said. “I’ve worked as a public relations strategist, as a freelance journalist, and everywhere in between. I’ve always been interested in what kind of stories people want to tell, how people tell those stories, and how to help them tell those stories and share them with the world.”

“I met a few SB Nation folks at a Major League Soccer media party in early 2013,” Naboa y Rivera recalled. “About a week after that, I got an email from one of the guys running the SB Nation soccer vertical wondering if I’d be interested in covering New York City FC, and setting up their SB Nation blog for the team.”

“We had to move quickly, because MLS began moving very quickly to nail down New York City as the 20th MLS team, and we wanted the SB Nation site up before the team was announced, if at all possible. The official announcement of the team came on May 21st, 2013, and I was there for the press conference; being affiliated with SB Nation helped with that.”

Other than the fact that HRB is somehow older than the team it was founded to cover, what’s most notable here is that the platform wasn’t always independent. For the first decade, the site was owned and operated by SB Nation, a sports blogging network owned by Vox Media. “They provided the platform. They provided the finances. They have hundreds of sites,” Strand explained. “And they provided the architecture for all the sites to function.”

These hundreds of sites cover nearly every aspect of the American sports landscape, from the NFL, NBA, and MLB, to college sports, hockey, combat sports, and soccer. Some sites are dedicated to a single team, while others are focused on leagues as a whole. At its peak, most MLS franchises had their own SB Nation site, and HRB served as that resource.

But Vox delivered a massive blow to the American soccer media landscape last year by announcing they would shut down most of their SB Nation MLS-related sites. In a sweeping cost-cutting effort, the organization laid off 7% of its staff and closed the door on all of its MLS-specific sites except two¹. The rest were left to fend for themselves.

For some sites, this marked the end of the road. For example, the New York Red Bulls’ Once a Metro shut down completely after being dropped by Vox. Most, however, sought to keep the lights on. For HRB, fortunately, it wasn’t a choice between continuing or shutting down. As Strand put it, “It was a question of making the right choice.”

“There were sports networks that wanted us to come on, and we would’ve made more money, but there would’ve been a lot of gambling ads and paid content,” Strand said. “Another possibility was to cheap out and go with a basic WordPress site. I tried to thread the line between the two.”

The final result was a beautiful new website with a fresh look and an improved user interface. Most importantly, it became an entirely independent operation. However, the complications and complexities of running a media platform as a business proved vast for Strand.

“Now that we’re independent,” Strand acknowledged, “I see how much SB Nation did for us. It’s like when you’re like a teenager at home and you look at your parents as being a couple of idiots, and then you go into the real world and it’s like, ‘God, I have to get a job and have to get insurance’. God forbid, you get a home and it’s like, ‘God, I have to take care of the boiler’. All this stuff needs to be taken care of.”

HRB’s new layout

From mind-numbing backend work, and market research, to collaboration with graphic designers, and self-teaching British tax law, the leg work needed for this process was enormous for Strand and his team, especially considering that this is not a primary source of employment for anyone involved.

Then, of course, there’s the financial side of everything. “It’s interesting going from being a writer and an editor and being paid for what you do, to running a business where all of the sudden you have to pay to publish,” Strand recalled. “That first year when we were independent, we operated at a pretty severe loss and I just paid for it out of pocket.”

“When you’re independent, you have no financial muscle. You’re the financial weakling on the beach and everyone comes by and kicks sand in your face.” After splitting from SB Nation, the platform needed financial strength beyond ad revenue from site traffic, which was insufficient and damaged the user experience. “Google ads are disgusting,” Strand complained. “Foul things [like tooth implants, conceal and carry ads] were being sold that should not be on our website. That’s not what we’re about.”

After a decade of financial support by SB Nation, and a year of relying on advertising, HRB turned to a new approach for staying afloat financially: a subscription model.

“We have different price tiers, and they all get you exactly the same thing,” Strand explained. “If you spend $20 a year or $200 a year, you get the exact same access to our website.”

“Not only that, most of the website [85-90%] is in front of the paywall,” Strand continued. ”Nobody really needs to pay in order to enjoy the website. You can read most of the articles without being a member, and yet people are choosing to do it.”

But why would people choose to pay? If most of the site’s content is available for free, why shell out a monthly fee? “People are giving us money because they believe in what we’re doing, and that’s really touching,” Strand said. “I think that we really see how much of a community there is. And I don’t mean this as lip service - I really mean it. It’s touching to see how many people have joined.”

This model allows fans to access HRB’s coverage for free while enabling those with the means to provide significant support beyond a $2.00 recurring fee. This additional investment has opened up new opportunities that were impossible under previous models. “I’d like to start paying writers for posts. Nobody is paid right now, and I feel bad about that”, Strand said. “I’d like to be able to at least give a little bit of money for their articles because it’s their time, work, and research.”

Although HRB’s push for independence was driven out of necessity rather than choice, it has the platform headed in a bold new direction that it might never have discovered otherwise. This shift has ushered in an era of ambition.

“Hopefully we can bring in even more writers, and have deeper stories and more information, and turn this into a virtuous cycle,” Strand continued. “The more subscribers we have, the more resources we’ll have, which means we can do even more, which will make our subscribers happy, and hopefully get us more subscribers.”

This aspiration from an independent media outlet is significant in the diverse American soccer landscape. Whatever niche you seek in this ever-growing community, there’s probably an independent site covering it. 

But, it’s still the Wild West out there. From bloggers in their mom’s basement and college kids cutting their teeth to seasoned professionals with decades of coverage, the space is dominated by no single archetype. Sometimes the work is a stepping stone to a journalism career, but more often, it’s a labor of love, driven by a passion for the sport and a desire to see it grow in this country.

On the field, there’s nothing anyone can do about the USMNT crashing out in the group stages of Copa America – that bump in the road of growth falls squarely on the coaches and players. Off-the-field growth, however, is a responsibility that independent media has taken into their own hands out of necessity, and one that national and local legacy media continues to pass up on.

When ESPN and Fox Sports fail to cover the sport consistently on a national level, and local media giants like The New York Times, New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal neglect to cover local teams, the responsibility falls to content owners like Apple and MLS. This poses a journalistic problem: when content owners become the primary mouthpiece, the line between responsible journalism and unchecked glorification blurs. Triumphs are celebrated, while bad press is quietly swept under the rug.

With MLS, this issue is exacerbated by their complex relationship with Apple TV. While Apple acts as the presenter, MLS controls production, hiring producers, directors, and on-air talent. In this structure, the storylines or lack thereof (see: Referee Lockout, Bruce Arena, Leagues Cup) you’ll hear on Apple’s broadcasts are league-friendly. This lack of local and national coverage, combined with a globally motivated broadcasting partner, creates a vacuum of criticism for MLS. Consequently, individual franchises can power through negative storylines that would otherwise garner significant backlash from fans.

For example, in the case of NYCFC, this issue hits close to home with the club’s handling of David Villa’s alleged sexual harassment of an intern. The full story, which MLSSoccer.com did not cover², emerged only when independent reporting from The Athletic brought the facts to light that might have been suppressed otherwise.

Without independent media, storylines like these risk going unpublished. If league-sponsored media is incentivized to promote a positive brand image and larger legacy platforms turn a blind eye to the sport, independent media is left to hold teams accountable. Most importantly, independent media does so with genuine interest, passion, and love for their club, league, and sport.

That’s why support for sites like HRB from fans is vital for the American soccer ecosystem. Without it, the sites that responsibly feed our soccer addiction cannot survive. And without them, you’re at the mercy of whatever Alexi Lalas and Colin Cowherd might spew out next.

So, buy that hat from The Outfield’s Summer 2024 Merch Collection, give a couple of bucks to your favorite podcast, check out a jersey from Olive and York, and of course, subscribe to Hudson River Blue. ❧

Image: John Douglas, View of the Hudson Highlands with Woman Painting

1. The two, Sounders at Heart and Dirty South Soccer, only made it a year before they also went independent.

2.