To be clear, I wrote all of this before the start of my planned stepping back from the HoriZone Roundtable.
I couldn’t help but put this together, because a lot happened in 2025, and we’ve made a lot of changes to make what we do here ever better. For starters, we’ve expanded our staff on the editorial side, making Kyle Rossi our women’s editor and adding Sara Urban as our copy editor and, most recently, John Ostapowicz as our men’s editor. We’ve also added the role of development coordinator (read: the person who comes up with ways to generate money), and that position is in the capable hands of Eric Fischer.
Patreon has grown by leaps and bounds over the last year, with 84 members currently at all three subscription levels that we offer. We can attribute this boost to creating new incentives that included shifting our off-season features to exclusive access for Patrons, as well as some additional Patreon-only features, such as James Moon’s video game series and Eric’s Guess the ex-Horizon League Player.
As 2026 rolls around, our end goal remains the same: To get to a point where paying writers isn’t just something that occurs occasionally. With Northern Illinois coming into the league in July, our projected expenditures for next year change a bit. Plus, this does not include any money that would be paid out to the editorial staff, and these are the low-end estimates assuming one article per week for our writers.
| Preseason Features (1 per week) | 17 | $ 50.00 | $ 850.00 |
| Preseason Articles (2/week average) | 54 | $ 25.00 | $ 1,350.00 |
| Preview Week Articles | 28 | $ 50.00 | $ 1,400.00 |
| In-Season Articles (24/week) | 408 | $ 25.00 | $ 10,200.00 |
| Tournament Articles (HL/NCAA/etc.) | 10 | $ 25.00 | $ 250.00 |
| Subtotal | $ 14,050.00 |
In 2025, we generated $3,583.62 through our Patrons, the sponsorship from the Horizon League of the Expand Your Horizon venture, ad revenues via Google AdSense, and our donors throughout the year (minus, of course, the money we raised in November that we contributed to local food banks). As you can see, of course, we’re still running a bit of a gap between what we’ve made and what we want to spend. For 2026, we want to work on closing that gap.
So, donors can continue to give during the year at horizoneroundtable.com/donate. We also continue to invite you all to become Patrons and take advantage of exclusive and early access to pieces you can’t find elsewhere, and you can do that for as little as $1/month at patreon.com/horizoneroundtable. If we get to a certain amount of subscription revenues, we may be also to offer something we currently don’t: annual subscriptions.
You will also notice on our Donate page that we have links to the various payment accounts for our writers. Even if you don’t want to contribute to us as an organization, you’re more than welcome to send some cash your favorite writer’s way. After all, they’re the ones who are putting the work in on the writing front.
As we’ve long said, the state of sports journalism should be where writers and editors should be paid for their work, and many of you have answered that call. For those of you who have, we thank you and look forward to your continued support in 2026. For the rest of you, the time has come for you to embrace that what we do is worth something to you, in some capacity.
Finally, of course, while we didn’t openly solicit sponsorship opportunities (with the exception of the Horizon League for the preview podcast), we are now. If you’re an organization who follows us online and sees what we do and how we can benefit you, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a line at horizoneroundtable@gmail.com or visit horizoneroundtable.com/advertise-with-us/.
We’ve had a lot of changes this year, as we said good-bye to, among others, Matt Dudek as our long-time podcast co-host and John Parker, who’s been a part of this adventure since the beginning of the site. At the same time, we’ve welcomed Jim Sarow as our new co-host, as well as retained some outstanding writers. And as I mentioned already, I’ll still be co-hosting the preview pod, and I do expect to return to full capacity at some point, though I don’t know when. At the same time, if 2025 has been any indication, it’s clear that the HoriZone Roundtable has the pieces in place to remain the spot for you to get everything you need related to the Horizon League.
Subscribe to our emails, and get our latest posts in your inbox, plus a weekly digest of everything we've published!
