Posted by chicagomedia.org on August 28, 2008 at 11:06:05:
ChicagoSports.com gets a new address
After nearly 8½ years as the home on the Web for Chicago sports fans everywhere, ChicagoSports.com is trading in its familiar red-and-black for blue-and-white as our staff and our coverage change addresses from here to chicagotribune.com/sports next week.
We expect to take nearly everything from our old home to the new, including "From the Cubicle" and "Bear with Us" and most of the blogs. Gil Thorp too. It will just be on chicagotribune.com instead of ChicagoSports.com.
Why is this happening? You may not have known it, but our staff has been programming chicagotribune.com's sports section since late 2004. That's a lot of work and we think we can serve our readers better by focusing on one site instead of two. The ChicagoSports.com domain name and identity may still have a future here, but we're still trying to figure that out.
We'll always have a lot of great memories of ChicagoSports.com. We've delivered more than a billion page views since opening on March 27, 2000, received millions of visitors, and even won an award in 2006 from Editor and Publisher as the best Internet Sports Service in our class. And we had one great television commercial that still makes us laugh.
We've been to Japan, to spring training, to Miami for a Super Bowl. We've done high school sports, college sports, golf, soccer, auto racing ... and of course, pro sports. We've been here while the Bulls fell apart and seemingly revived, while the Bears made the playoffs, went to hell, and made the Super Bowl. We saw the White Sox win the World Series in 2005. And we saw Game 6 of the Cubs playoff demise in 2003.
And we’ll be there at chicagotribune.com to see if the Bears continue heading in the wrong direction, to watch if the Blackhawks are finally going to start heading in the right direction, and to see if both Chicago baseball teams do as well in the fall as they have in the spring and summer.
George Knue and Adam Caldarelli have been with the site since the beginning; Rahula Strohl and Amanda Kaschube are more recent additions. Adam, Rahula and Amanda will continue to watch over the new chicagotribune.com sports section while George takes on a new challenge here. He won't be far away, though. Chris King, another member of the original team, still keeps his hand in after leaving for another department more than a year ago and other ChicagoSports.com alumni are spread across the building and across Web sites around the country.
We'll miss ChicagoSports.com, but we promise to be just as passionate about sports on chicagotribune.com/sports as we've always been. We've always strived to build a site that people like us -- Chicago sports fans -- would want to read and we'll continue to do so. We care about the subject matter, we care about making a connection with you, and we care about doing it right.
Of all the things that have happened over the years, the most gratifying has been the reaction we have always gotten from you -– whether it’s been contributing your own words to our daily report or just sending us e-mails with advice, criticism, or praise. That’s something that won’t change -– we may have changed our address but not our commitment to making our sports site your sports site.
See you on the other side. And thanks for the memories.
(ChicagoSports.com)