Welcome to Aftermath’s second Inside Baseball week, a whole week of stories about the ins and outs of video game development, games journalism, and what it’s like to run a worker-owned website.
We did our first Inside Baseball week back when Aftermath was just four months old, and it turned out to be one of the most fun (and successful) weeks in the site’s history. In the time since, we’ve been doing plenty of the kind of work that inspired that first theme week, and we want to use this Inside Baseball week to celebrate the best of what Aftermath can do: tell the stories of real people in game development and games journalism, dig deeply into niche topics, tell you how journalism works, and do the kinds of off-the-cuff blogs that other sites have less and less room for in their owners’ pursuit of traffic and ad dollars.
We tell you this a lot, but we can only do all of this because of YOU, our readers. The growth of the site since our first Inside Baseball week has been incredible; thanks to you, we’ve been able to bring on a new contributor, run more freelance stories, start a new podcast, and more. (We’ll have a bigger update on our goal this week.) If you’re a subscriber, thank you–every single one of you who believes in what we’re doing here, who sends us tips, who makes our Discord fun and our comments worth reading, who shares our work or says nice things about the site on social media or in our inboxes. We’ve been at this a while, but it still amazes us that Aftermath isn’t just working, but growing and thriving. None of that would be possible without you and your support.
If you aren’t a subscriber yet, but you’ve been curious about us or enjoying our work, we’d love to have you. We have a range of subscription tiers, as well as gift subscriptions if you have a journalism-loving person in your life. We know times are tough right now, so if a subscription isn’t in the cards, we’d love it if you’d spread the word about Aftermath, contribute to our tip jar, or just let us know you're enjoying the site.
We started Aftermath when things were looking pretty bleak for journalism, and… well, they aren’t looking much better. But this site has been a bright spot for us–not just because it helps pay our bills, but because we can get up every day and make the work we want for readers who want it too, without having to squeeze in ad breaks or justify ourselves to owners. We’ll keep doing it for as long as we can, and we're so glad to have you with us.
