A Big Announcement for SSG
For more information on the below, please listen to today’s episode of the podcast.
Animals,
Here is some good news and some bad: Star Spangled Gamblers is about to change.
Tomorrow, I’ll be joining POLITICO’s podcasting team. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime for me and I owe all of you a great deal of thanks for it. Your support for SSG and your feedback over the four (!) years we’ve been doing this has been an Ivy League education in digital media. Without your input, we’d never have been able to learn the skills necessary to grow this community and to appeal to distinguished publishers like POLITICO.
Now, the bad news: for the time being, I’ll have to step away from SSG.
That means the nature of this podcast will change too. Its frequency and authorship will be different, but it will persist. That’s thanks to our #1 accomplishment – something that transcends merely “betting and winning real money on politics” – which is our success in organizing the global forecasting community. And that community is here to stay. 16 people living on 4 continents contribute to SSG and they will be turning the crank with or without me. So look forward to that.
Finally, we’ve been here before. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to depart from the platform, and if the past is prologue, this new era will benefit our project in the long run. That’s because political gambling suffers from one big problem: obscurity. Most people don’t know about it; and if they do, they don’t trust it or take it seriously.
There are many steps to “winning the long fight” but critical among them is establishing credibility with the public. I can think of no better way to do this than to have members of our own community inside of powerful institutions, like POLITICO. And while I will not be working on a project like this per se, I will be bringing our shared perspective and experiences into a management role within one of the world’s most powerful media brands. That means being an advocate for the novel methods of forecasting that many of you have pioneered – but on a vastly larger stage.
For the time being, Pratik Chougule will take over as SSG’s Editor-in-Chief. If you want to stay in touch with me, please follow me on Twitter (@keendawg). I’ll be underground for a few months but you’ll hear from me again.
To close this era out – we’ve always insisted on doing things differently here. So to thank all of you for your support over the years, and for the friendships you’ve helped us cultivate on this platform, we commissioned a song by Eli Braden – a contributor to both SSG and The Howard Stern Show. Guaranteed to make you laugh. Give it a listen.
I’ll see you next time, fam!
KEENDAWG.
FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE ABOVE, PLEASE LISTEN TO THE MOST RECENT PODCAST:
KEENDAWG.
