Greetings,

Thanks for picking up this magazine, our first issue of Packerland Pride. We’re excited to get the inaugural one out the door and into your hands. It has been an exciting and busy few months leading to this point; seeing the finished product is a pretty fulfilling thing for us, to see it all come together and finally out in the real world. A lot of people have contributed to this point, and Packerland Pride would be nowhere without them.

Anyway, what is this Packerland Pride, you ask? We’re a monthly magazine focused on delivering compelling, partially localized to you, our markets, contemporary and historical content on the Green Bay Packers. We’ll do this through longer narrative feature stories — such as this month’s piece on the Packer Hall of Fame Golf Classic — through comparisons or profiles of past and present Packers, like Clay Matthews and Ray Nitschke in this issue; through profiles of Packers places around the state, be it shrines, restaurants or bars or otherwise; through telling the stories of your traditions, your tailgating experiences, your recipes as fans in Central or Northern Wisconsin. We’ll also do this through columns that can be written without the pressure of generating a Hot Sports Take everyday, with a little more time to think and expand on the issues of either the previous or coming month. Or both. We’ll have Top 10 lists and trivia and fan submitted photos because those are fun.

We’ll also have, thanks to extensive and incredibly generous support from the Packer Hall of Fame, monthly features on items in their limitless archives of Green Bay Packer history. Trust me when I say we’ll all be surprised together with what comes out of the Hall of Fame’s storage rooms.

Packerland Pride will be these things and probably more that we don’t even know yet. This is a brand new magazine, started from scratch, so it can evolve to your tastes as we wade through what works or what doesn’t, what we need more or less of. If it’s not changing, we might not be thinking outside of the box enough.

One thing we know we’re striving for: making sure Packerland Pride is unlike anything you’ve read anywhere before. We are not on the beat, we are not on the daily grind nor are we your source for the latest trade rumors or injury updates. (We certainly thank the guys who are, though.) We are about the Packers, of course, but we are also just as much about you, Packer fans. We want to be laying somewhere in the middle of that intersection between Packer football and Packers fan culture. The Packers are THE PACKERS for a variety of reasons historical and football-related, but they’re also a state-wide (even national) brand because Packers fans are everywhere, especially in Wisconsin.

This is to say: we need you. We need those tailgating experiences, special recipes, pictures, Packers bars and basements full of memorabilia. We believe almost every Packers fan has a story to tell that is unique to their own experience from being such a supporter. We want to tailgate with you, if you’ll have us, or watch a game at that place you always watch it, or see what traditions are important to you. We want pictures of your tailgates, or that time you met a clan of Packer fans on vacation, or anything in between. (Fair warning: remember we’ll want to publish these.)

We want to do a lot, as you might be able to tell. A lot of it can’t happen to the extent we hope without contributions or suggestions from real-life Packer fans. The regular season is coming. Let us know how and where we should best be spending it. The football stuff and the historical content will be there, but Packerland Pride is about more than that, in that it’s about you too.

I hope the passion and hours of work we’ve done to make this unique and special shows through in this first issue. Hopefully there’s something here that piques your interest or makes you all the more antsy for kickoff. As a fan, that’s what it’s about, after all. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Go Pack!

Griffin Gotta

Editor, Packerland Pride