How New York Soccer Journal rose from the ashes of Hudson River Blue

For as long as Hudson River Blue existed, the site did something that no outlet in the Tri-State Area with a larger staff and bigger budget ever quite managed to pull off: it showed up.

Every week, for 13 years, through five executive editors, two platform structures, and a divorce from SB Nation, someone at HRB was filing something about NYCFC. Not because there was money in it — there wasn’t, really, not for most of the people doing the work — but because a specific community of readers in New York had built their relationship with the club around that coverage, and the people producing it understood that and felt its weight.

Andrew Leigh felt it as much as anyone. He joined HRB in 2022 as a contributor and eventually became its executive editor, fully aware that the arrangement wouldn’t pay him. That’s not unusual in this space — the number of people in the United States who are paid full-time to cover American soccer is vanishingly small — and it doesn’t change much from year to year. Most of the serious local coverage that exists does so because individuals have decided the work matters enough to do without compensation. Leigh is one of those people, which is why, when Hudson River Blue went dark in March — for reasons that were never made fully transparent to him — he spent about three weeks figuring out how to start over rather than simply walking away.

“There was very little transparency around the state of affairs,” he tells Awful Announcing. “We thought we had established ourselves as a sturdy, independent publication. We had a growing audience. We weren’t really operating under that assumption that this could happen.”

A publication can have a loyal audience, a growing readership, real journalistic value, and still disappear because the business forces governing it have nothing to do with any of that. The readers weren’t the ones who decided to close Hudson River Blue. They were just the ones left without it.

“We knew that people valued what we did before,” Leigh said, “but when you’re presented with it disappearing, it helped us kind of pick it up again.”

The result is the New York Soccer Journal, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit Leigh launched in April with roughly five other former HRB contributors. Donations are tax-deductible, the financials are transparent by law, and whatever comes in goes back into the coverage. When you’re a nonprofit, the mission is the thing. There are no investors to pay back, no growth target that requires sacrificing the specific, narrow thing you’re actually good at. The Northland Soccer Journal in Minnesota — a former SB Nation site running the same model — showed Leigh it could be done. He didn’t have to invent the wheel, just build one that fit New York.

“We covered the cost of operating New York Soccer Journal within the first 24 hours,” he said. “So then it just becomes what can we do beyond that.”

That means covering travel expenses for reporters, tolls for contributors driving in from New Jersey or Connecticut to cover an NYCFC match, and the unglamorous overhead of keeping a publishing operation running. Beyond that, eventually, paying the people doing the work — not a salary, not yet — but something, structured like the contractor agreements SB Nation once offered, because Leigh believes the principle of compensation matters even when the sums are modest.

MLS local coverage is a niche inside a niche, and there is no version of the New York Soccer Journal that becomes The Athletic. The number of people who will pay specifically to read granular NYCFC coverage is finite. But it exists, and it’s served consistently and well by almost nobody else.

The New York Post has a soccer reporter. The New York Daily News and The New York Times (The Athletic) pay attention when there’s a big story. But the deep, week-in-week-out coverage of NYCFC? That was HRB, or it was nobody.

“We keep up with every single thing that happens with that team,” Leigh said. “The local coverage has done better lately — the Post has really ramped up its soccer coverage locally — but it’s never consistent. I’ve followed the team for all 12 of their seasons in MLS, and there have been ebbs and flows where maybe somebody at a place like the Post was consistently covering the team week in, week out, but I would say it’s not stayed that way for the entire 12-season existence of the team.”

The credentialing that makes coverage like this possible isn’t guaranteed. There have been instances, Leigh is careful to note, where teams have made access choices that didn’t serve independent outlets well. But he doesn’t spend much energy on it. The expectation that MLS or its clubs will actively sustain independent coverage is, in his view, unrealistic and beside the point. What matters is getting in the room, doing the work, and making the coverage so indispensable that access follows. Being there — physically, consistently, for years — is how that relationship gets built. It’s also, not coincidentally, the thing the New York Soccer Journal’s larger competitors have never managed to sustain.

One of the things Leigh wants to build into the New York Soccer Journal, which HRB never quite formalized, is a pipeline for young journalists. Several people who came up through the outlet’s coverage were finishing journalism degrees when they started. Sending reporters to the World Cup this summer is partly about the coverage itself and partly about something longer-term.

“I don’t really believe the idea that sports journalism is dead and about to be dead,” he said. “A way to keep it going is to continue to try to find different ways to do it. This is one of those ways.”

It might not work. Independent media is hard, nonprofit independent media is harder, and independent nonprofit media covering a specific professional soccer club in New York City is a category of difficulty that most reasonable people would not voluntarily enter. Leigh knows this. He’s been in this world long enough to watch multiple versions of this kind of outlet fail.

But he’s also watched enough of it to know what it looks like when people care about something enough to keep doing it even when it’s not working in any conventional sense. That’s what Hudson River Blue was for 13 years. And when it ended, the thing that surprised him most wasn’t that it hurt; it was how quickly he knew he was going to try again.