Announcing Write For California Premium!

Read more about our effort to provide you with even more Cal sports fan fun!

Come, won’t you join us inside?

After much thought, debate, and deliberation, we here at Write for California have an important announcement to make: Starting with the upcoming football season, we will be expanding our coverage of Cal sports with the creation of Write for California premium content.

If you don’t need convincing, you can subscribe right now:

Why?

Because we believe this change serves the goal of this website: to create the best online Cal fan community possible, and to foster fun and thought-provoking discussion of Cal sports.

What will this mean in practice?

On top of the content that you have come to expect over the years here and previously at California Golden Blogs, we will be producing additional content, which will be subscription-based.

Obviously, when any service that has previously been free moves to any kind of pay model, plenty of legitimate questions will follow. We’re going to do our best to answer those questions and help you decide whether you want to support Write for California with a premium subscription.

What stuff is free, and what will be behind a paywall?

As we planned this next step, our goal was to provide you with everything you’re used to for free and provide some more exclusive content with our new premium model. Here’s a breakdown:

A NON-COMPREHENSIVE LIST OF STUFF THAT WILL REMAIN FREE

• Game recaps (including Nam Le’s Novel!), roundtables, rating the game, power rankings, game previews, opponent Q&As, the Golden Bearcast podcast, breaking news coverage, non-revenue sports coverage, and more.

In short, during football and basketball season, you can expect multiple articles per day to remain up on our website, free of charge, just like always.

A NON-COMPREHENSIVE LIST OF STUFF ON WRITE FOR CALIFORNIA PREMIUM

• A brand new weekly podcast for subscribers, featuring Piotr and yours truly

• Expanded play breakdowns and Xs-and-Os analysis

• Recruiting coverage, including scouting and tape breakdown from Cal’s upcoming classes

• PFF advanced stats and grading, and our original analysis of their data

In short, we hope to provide paying subscribers an average of five articles each week during the football and basketball seasons.

You folks always made such a big deal about being a volunteer outfit. Are you all getting paid now?

No! Or, at least not any time soon.

Then, what are you going to do with subscription proceeds?

Believe it or not, there are expenses associated with running this website the way we want to run it. Among various expenses, we pay for podcasting equipment, subscriptions to info sites like PFF and Kenpom, website domain costs, and communication tools that we use behind the scenes to keep the machine rolling. So we’re hoping to use your subscriptions to defray expenses associated with running this website at the quality level that we hope you’ve come to expect. We’re not attempting to make money here, but we’re also trying not to lose money.

If this venture turns out to be a smashing success, and we make more money than expected, we will use any extra proceeds towards two worthwhile efforts:

1: Invest into the Write for California community to make this the very best spot for Cal fans online.

When SB Nation forced our hand with their restructuring in March 2020, and we had to scramble to go independent, we didn’t have the time or money to build the kind of website that we would like. 

Substack meets some basic needs, but it’s designed for authors to write for readers — and not built to allow a community to thrive.

We hope to build and maintain a website with features we believe you’ll love and value: live and threaded comments, message boards, and fan-created content. But, building and maintaining this kind of website is expensive and will take us some time.

2: Donate to worthwhile causes in the Cal community.

We believe donations to the community are always a great option. In our California Golden Blogs days, we donated profits to the Cal Band, the group that has provided the founders of this effort and keeps Cal spirit alive when, say, Tom Holmoe is the head coach. Whether we continue to donate to the Cal band or find other worthwhile causes within the Cal community, we look forward to continuing to support those in need.

How much does a Write for California subscription cost?

California Gridiron @calgridiron

Captains James Looney, Matt Anderson, and Kanawai Noa are ready for kickoff. #9 days until Cal football.

We priced our subscriptions competitively, especially compared to other college sports news sites: $9/month or $90/year (two months free!)

We’ve always prided ourselves in covering Olympic sports and writing original analysis and feature stories, so you can expect great content year-round.

I’m considering subscribing, but I’m not sure yet. Can I try a Write for California premium subscription?

As we launch, we’ll keep everything free for the first two weeks. We’ll note what kind of content we’ll put behind our paywall over the rest of the season and year. We hope this will give you the chance to decide whether or not our planned content is worth the subscription.

Anything else we should know?

We’re planning a bunch of cool stuff, so keep your eyes peeled for announcements and info. Among other plans, we will announce more specifics about exclusive merchandise, new writers, and new community features.

More than anything else, thank you for your continued readership and participation on this website. We feel very grateful to make it to the return of the football season, and we can’t wait to share 2021 and beyond with you and the rest of the Cal community. Go Bears!