Sounder at Heart will become a reader-supported website on Aug. 21

Much of what we’ll be doing will remain the same, but we will need your support to make this sustainable as an independent venture.

Sounder at Heart has been the standard bearer for coverage of MLS teams virtually ever since the site was founded in 2008 by Dave Clark. For the last 14 years, that’s been as part of SB Nation and Vox Media, as we’ve become an integral part of the local soccer community.

On Aug. 21, we are officially returning to our roots as an independent soccer news site. At the same time, we’ll be formally combining forces with Nos Audietis — which has always technically been a separate and independent venture since its founding in 2011 — as well as maintaining our OL Reign coverage through Ride of the Valkyries. We’ll all operate under the banner of PNW Soccer Media, a name you might start seeing from time to time but will mostly remain in the background.

This is not something that is happening to us, but by us. We initiated the conversations with SB Nation/Vox Media about making this happen several months ago and they have graciously agreed to our transition plan. They’ve been instrumental in helping us grow from a tiny one-person operation into the most-read MLS blog in the world, and now they’ve approved this unique transition.

This is a very exciting time for everyone involved, but especially for Jeremiah, who will be leaving his job at SB Nation/Vox in order to lead this project full-time.

We are doing this because we believe we can improve everything we do and this is the best way to ensure our long-term viability. We will continue to provide a depth and breadth of coverage that is unrivaled in any MLS market that includes daily beat coverage, in-depth analysis and informed opinion writing, all of which is grounded in original reporting.

While we’ll have a fresh-looking website and you’ll need to sign up for a new account to comment, it will still be at the same URL, have all the same social channels and our intention is to keep all our contributors, including our coverage of Reign under the banner Ride of the Valkyries. We’re also hoping to revive YachtCon as well as start hosting smaller-scale quarterly live events. Although we won’t have our full archives ready the day of the launch, we will ultimately retain them and work on getting them back up in relatively short order. (Unfortunately, our archived photos and comment history will likely be lost in the move.)

This only works as a sustainable project with your support.

Taking after such world-class local independent media outlets as KEXP, our new model is mostly reader-supported. Our membership plans will allow us to keep the vast majority of our content in front of the paywall, while also offering various types of perks to our supporters.

The new website is very much in beta mode now, but we’d love it if you check it out, and maybe even leave a comment as we continue to work out the kinks. You can access it here with the password “Sounders74.” You can also find more information about our membership plans. (Two quick notes: 1. If you’re already a paid subscriber on the Nos Audietis Substack account, please hold off on creating a new Ghost account as that could complicate the billing process; 2. We are still putting the final touches on a new commenting system that will look and feel very similar to what we currently have, but won’t have all the features we’ve grown accustomed to.)

One of the exciting changes with our platform move will be an increased ability to utilize email notifications and newsletters. If you’re already a subscriber to either the Nos Audietis Substack or the Sounder at Heart newsletter, we’ll automatically enroll you in the new flagship newsletter on the new site and will start sending out new content soon. In addition to our flagship newsletter — which will be a column followed by links to our most interesting content — we’ll offer several other options that will allow significantly more customization.

We’re also going to grandfather anyone who bought an annual subscription on Substack into our current membership plan. If you’re a monthly subscriber, however, you’ll need to manually renew your membership. (Again, don’t actually do anything yet if you’re already a paid subscriber.)

For those of you willing to sign up before we finalize the transition, we’re going to keep the cost at $50/year and $150/year — depending on which tier you select — while also adding some new paid membership perks and tiers. That offer will be good until we finalize the move on Aug. 21.

Finally, we are looking for some new launch sponsors to help get us off the ground and provide some added security going forward. If you have a business or organization you think would benefit from supporting this venture, we’d love to talk to you about how that would look. You can direct inquiries here.

To help us figure out to make this transition as positive as possible, we’ve also created a survey we’d very much appreciate you filling out.