In 2005, DaBearsBlog.com was launched on a couch in Manhattan by Jeff Hughes and Noah Brier, and for more than a year it lingered in relative anonymity. In 2006, however, Hughes spelled the name “Adam Archuleta” wrong, and the additional “t” led to a search engine bonanza. Suddenly, DBB went from 25 readers a day, mostly folks looking to find the SNL sketch, to 250 readers a day and, unsurprisingly, the Bears found themselves playing in the Super Bowl as a result.
The journey since has been a wild one.
We’ve leaked Ricky Manning Jr. suspension news to David Haugh in exchange for a blurb in his column that never came. (And we haven’t forgotten.) We broke the story of the firings of Matt Nagy and Ryan Pace on an Irish video blog, and subsequently delivered a play-by-play of the interviews for those jobs strictly to spite Dan Wiederer. (Our Twitter following jumped more than 20,000 as a result.) We’ve walked through the American embassy in London with a sickly Adam Jahns and drank more than our share of Old Styles with Rick Pearson at the Billy Goat.
DBB has set a record for football-related haiku creation, while also tackling the league’s handling of mental health and ranking our 100 favorite bars in the world. But most importantly, and with the exception of our worst period, an ill-fated year or two with the doomed-from-the-start ChicagoNow network, DBB has remained the internet’s most important independent voice covering the Chicago Bears.
In 2023, DBB announced the hiring of our second editor-in-chief, Robert K. Schmitz. Schmitz is tasked with escorting DBB into the modern media landscape, employing a combination of tape analysis and audio commentary to ensure DBB remains relevant for the foreseeable future.
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