Now it can be told.
A number of you noticed, a while ago, that I had changed my user name here from "Al" to "Al Yellon". I told you I'd let you know "soon".
"Soon" has arrived. Late last night, SB Nation Chicago launched, along with regional sites for Washington, Boston, Detroit, New York, and Arizona. All the writers for these sites, as well as the mothership, SBNation.com, post under their real names -- thus the change.
But what's this new site about? Follow me past the jump for the details.
SB Nation Chicago is not in any way intended to be a replacement for the individual team blogs. In fact, one of the goals of this exciting project is to bring more traffic to the team blogs and emphasize their content as much as possible; you'll see featured FanPosts from Second City Hockey, Blog-a-Bull, Windy City Gridiron, South Side Sox (be nice, please), and Sippin' on Purple for NU fans. SB Nation Chicago will be a general Chicago sports news site, with reaction and opinion pertaining to news from the fan perspective. Part of the site, as you can see, will be in the form of short takes on breaking, offbeat or quirky news in a section entitled "The Deep Dish", which will be updated several times during the day. The "Starting Lineup" will feature five links each day to news stories of interest.
We'll also run a "StoryStream™" on each local game while it's going on; this will provide previews, recaps, links to team blogs while in progress, or, if it's a big game like last night's Blackhawks win, live-blogging. StoryStreams™ will also be posted regarding ongoing and unfolding news stories; for an example of how this works, see this StoryStream™ on the Bulls' hiring of Tom Thibodeau, which will be updated again with more news as it comes in.
Over the next weeks and months we'll be adding more writers and commentators well-versed in Chicago sports and keeping up with everything that happens in our town. We've been working "behind the scenes" since last week, so there's already plenty of things on the site for you to recap the last week of Chicago sports. Paid Content wrote about the launch. So did the New York Times. Please head over and check it out, sign up and dive in.