Tuesday BP: The End of BPs

Good morning, McCoven.

By now, you’ve probably all seen the posts from SBNation addressing their chosen response to California Assembly Bill 5 and how it will affect content creators for their California team sites and those who create content for other sites but live in California. If you haven’t, there should be something on our front page, so go take a look.

(EDIT: Well, they were supposed to post something, anyway. Doesn’t look like they did.)

Per the new law, as I understand it, non-employees (meaning paid independent contractors and freelancers, etc) are no longer allowed to contribute and be paid for more than 35 submissions per year for an individual outlet without being reclassified as employees. Our entire staff, and the staff of almost all of the team sites, are all independent contractors, which means those of us affected by the new law will no longer be allowed to write for SBNation in our current capacity after the end of the year. Unless we do so for free. Meaning we're all being fired, eventually, because we either live in or cover a team based in California.

This doesn’t mean the end of McCovey Chronicles, but it does mean that our time running McCovey Chronicles is coming to an end very soon. Which also means that this is going to be my final morning BP post. You guys can decide where you’d like to congregate going forward. We’ll still have breaking news and our end of the decade content through the remainder of the year, but I’m not sure what things will look like after that. Many of us are staying on through March, but with the limitations, content will likely be sparse until they start to fill the new positions.

I don’t know what any of our futures with SBNation will be, or what the future of McCovey Chronicles will look like. So I just want to say that I’ve enjoyed being a part of this fantastic group of writers and the community that I've called home for the last five years. I hope that it is able to continue in some way going forward. Even without me.

Good afternoon, good evening, and goodnight, McCoven.

-Sami