With the start of training camp and with real Canes hockey on the horizon, my hope is to make a fairly abrupt turn with how Canes and Coffee functions and what we do here. From the beginning my goal was to make this site more conversational (like a coffee shop if you will) and less old school media where a handful of people write stuff and everyone else just reads it.
Ideally, Canes and Coffee would have started more in this model of a community. But with the volume of work just launching the site and handling behind the scenes stuff, I made the conscious decision to launch during the hockey offseason. And with a formal site launch just in time for the hockey nothingness that is August, I figured it just was not the right time to try to stir up hockey conversations. There really is not that much to talk about in August anyway. The initial focus was to get the site up and running successfully and start posting content regularly to at least build a small core community.
But we are now 2 days away from training camp which is arguably the richest time of the year for hockey debate and conversation (even more so than during the season if you ask me) and a perfect time make a pretty significant shift on what Canes and Coffee is and does.
So I invite everyone ranging from over-analytical hockey junkies to casual fans and especially new fans to register, pull up a chair, and join the conversation. We will tee up some things that are naturally conversational but also hope that discussions become the norm in general across everything on Canes and Coffee. I, and eventually others, will still write and provide content, but the hope is that this gradually becomes a smaller and smaller part of what Canes and Coffee is.
Please look for “Your turn” type posts that solicit varied opinions and also polls that aim to see what the broad Canes community thinks on a topic.
The audience for Canes and Coffee is still pretty small. My hope is that over the next 2-3 weeks leading up to the regular season we can launch v2.0 (or maybe it’s 2.1 at this point) of Canes and Coffee that is increasingly conversational and ready to welcome the broader Hurricanes community, especially casual and/or new fans.
The process to register to post on Canes and Coffee is pretty simple, is free obviously and requires only very basic/generic demographic data. Registrations do require approval (as a means to screen out evil bots and put up at least a speed bump to slow people with malicious intent), but after approval it is pretty simple to comment.
Thanks and Go Canes!
Matt Karash
Founder of Canes and Coffee
