An Announcement
Devin and I are joining a network. We hope you'll come with us.
Hello everyone.
By the time you read this, it will be announced that Devin and I have taken roles at an expanded version of Wide Left, Arif Hasan’s Substack. Devin is Chief of Content and I am Chief Operating Officer.
With this announcement, Two Gap is also going to become the college football and NFL Draft vertical of Wide Left, which means we’re moving. Our archive of posts here should be uploaded to Wide Left’s site by now, but if not they will be soon.
When Devin and I started Two Gap last year, we both wrote about how we wanted it to be a place for us to put content that didn’t fit neatly into our other responsibilities as journalists. We didn’t want to just be writing SEO-driven content, sacrificing quality for volume and driving ourselves into the ground.
That’s the same vision we have over at Wide Left. I first pitched this idea to Arif as a joke right before the beginning of the all-star circuit. As we met at the Shrine Bowl, Senior Bowl, and NFL Combine, we got more and more serious about it. Arif shares a similar appreciation for smart, detailed, longform journalism that Devin and I do. The more we talked about it, the more we realized that teaming up was our best path forward longterm.
People are starting their own individual Substacks to cover this sport every day, a natural consequence of people getting laid off by establishment journalism outlets. Those people have to make money eventually, and that means that every Substack is going to start charging for their newsletters at some point. Devin and I had a similar, if not very fleshed-out, plan.
In this way, journalism is falling victim to many of the same problems of the streaming world - suddenly, you’re paying $5/month to fifteen different services, rather than paying say, $12/month to Netflix as you did at the beginning of the streaming era. I know this is true - I pay a large handful of creators a few bucks a month while still paying for subscriptions to things like The Athletic, my local newspaper, and ESPN+.
Eventually, though, those services are going to coalesce back together. You’re already seeing this with streaming - you can get ESPN+, Hulu, and Disney+ for a discounted rate if you buy them all together. This is a cyclical problem - to go back to journalism, this is the same way sites like SB Nation and The Athletic rose to prominence.
We have a long way to go before Wide Left is included in that conversation, obviously. But teaming up together now puts us ahead of the curve of this cycle, not on time or behind it. With Arif, Devin, writers Ben Glassmire and James Foster, and editor Dante Collinelli alongside myself, we have a stable of creators that I’d put up against anybody in the industry even if you’re not familiar with all of those names yet.
Arif, Devin, and I are not businessmen. We’re just content creators. I think that gives us a pretty concrete edge. All of us have a strong conviction about the way a platform like this should look and operate, and we're very excited to bring that to life on a bigger scale with more resources at our disposal.
And so Devin and I hope that you’ll join us over at Wide Left. Our Substack export includes your subscriber emails, and you’ll be enrolled as a free subscriber to Wide Left if you’re not one already. There’s going to be content split between three verticals - Lead Dive for NFL, our existing Two Gap brand for college and NFL Draft, and Outside Zone for cultural and political commentary (one of Arif’s specialties). You can opt in or out of each vertical in your settings for the site.
It is a testament to your support of Devin and I as creators that we have this opportunity. We appreciate you and your support of Two Gap over the past year. It has been - and will continue to be - the project I am the most proud of.