Greg Bedard is taking a new job with the Las Vegas Review-Journal
Bedard isn't leaving Boston Sports Journal, but he indicated that the website's future is uncertain.
Greg Bedard has a new day job.
Bedard, the founding editor of the upstart website Boston Sports Journal, announced Tuesday that he is joining the Las Vegas Review-Journal as the newspaper’s new lead NFL writer. The move follows the unexpected death of Don Banks, who passed away in August shortly after being hired by the Review-Journal for the same job.
“The Review-Journal made me an offer that I couldn’t refuse,” Bedard wrote in a post Tuesday explaining his decision on the BSJ website, adding that the Nevada paper “aggressively pursued me to take the baton from my late friend and lead their NFL coverage.”
“I didn’t seek them out,” he wrote. “I haven’t applied for any jobs since we made the decision to go forward with BSJ nearly three years ago, but I did hear them out, and I really liked what I heard.”
Bedard will “transition” from BSJ this week, according to the Review-Journal, which published his first NFL column for the paper Tuesday.
But the new job doesn’t mean Bedard is abandoning his website or home state — at least not immediately.
The Massachusetts native and former Boston Globe writer says he will continue to “oversee and be involved with BSJ,” after launching the subscription-based Boston sports website in July 2017. Bedard says his Patriots coverage will “lessen over time” and that BSJ is looking for a new Patriots beat writer. However, in the meantime, he will be attending Patriots games and writing game breakdowns.
Bedard, who lives in Medway with his wife and twin children, also said he won’t be moving.
“That was one of the conditions of my employment,” he said. “I’ll be a Boston-based NFL writer, just like I was with when I was at the outlet formerly known at Sports Illustrated. Boston is who we are, it’s what our family loves. We have no plan or desire to leave.”
However, what Bedard’s new job spells for the long-term prospects of BSJ is less clear.
In his post Tuesday, he wrote that the website — which says it has more than 10,000 subscribers — will stop offering “three-year or lifetime memberships.”
“That’s not fair to anyone,” he wrote.
Bedard founded BSJ on the promise of reader-driven, hyper-local sports coverage. However, it wasn’t long before the site faced competition from the Boston expansion of The Athletic, another subscription-based sports website — but with the backing of venture capital and a national network of local sites (in July, The Athletic announced it had reached more than 500,000 subscribers across its entire platform).
As the editor and owner of BSJ, Bedard said he would continue to do what is in the best interest of the site, its employees, and its readers “until someone else is making those decisions.”
“I never made any promises beyond the type of coverage we’d strive to provide, and I’m proud to say we’ve lived up to that,” he wrote Tuesday. “But like I said at the time, this was virtually an entirely new venture and no one knew where it was going to go.”
While he said he still believes in the mission of the site and had rebuffed previous outside job offers, Bedard said that he was ultimately impressed with the Review Journal‘s investment in NFL coverage ahead of the Oakland Raiders’ plans to relocate to Las Vegas next season. Bedard said he was “excited” for the new job, but not “banking on anything” on the ever-unsettled ground of the media industry. Still, he said the Review-Journal position was the “right decision” for his family.
“My family, especially my wife, has sacrificed a great deal in this labor of love, which has required me to work every day for nearly three years now, “Bedard said, referring to BSJ.
“And I don’t regret any of it,” he said. “This has been the most fulfilling job and biggest honor of my career. Sometimes life just happens, and that’s what has happened here.”
