Puck buddies

The evolution of the blog has been an amazing thing. What once began as online diaries has evolved into a vehicle for change, information and entertainment.

The entertainment industry peruses blogs to get thoughts about what the general populace would to see in their movies and television shows. They recently changed the outfit of “Wonder Woman” in the upcoming movie reboot because of public outcry against the preview pictures that were released.

Members of the sports community have been known to use blogs to rally around their favorite teams and to deride their opponents. It seems that almost every professional athlete has blogs written about their performances and their hotness.

Even criminal investigations and crime-related news stories have the blogging community abuzz about details of high profile cases.

Enter Doug Johnson and Craig Brownstein. In 2006, they and a few associates began blogging about the Robert Wone murder. Wone was a straight man murdered in the Swann Street home of three gay men who were all present on the night of the murder.

Their blog whomurderedrobertwone.com covered all aspects of the trial and the investigation. Brownstein says, “It became the bible of the case.” The Wone murder case remains unsolved.

Johnson and Brownstein were also Washington Capitals fans and in the middle of a December 2010 Caps game, Brownstein turned to Johnson and said, “You’re my puck buddy.” The line prompted them to do some research and within a few weeks they created the hockey blog, Puck Buddys.

“It kind of started as a goof,” Johnson says. “We were trying to mix a blend of gay culture, sports, politics and hot guys.

Brownstein says straight hockey bloggers quickly became fans too.

Soon after they began blogging on the site, rabid fans began posting silly comments and the site grew into a national repository. Local straight bloggers such as russianmachineneverbreaks.com also welcomed the new gay twist on hockey blogging.

Even Washington Capitals owner Ted Leonsis has come on board, blogging and tweeting about Puck Buddys. When asked if he was surprised by the amount of straight women who post on the blog, Brownstein says, “That was to be expected since we are talking about icecakes.”

Icecakes? “That would be hot hockey players,” Johnson says.

Craig Brownstein, left, and Doug Johnson. (Photo courtesy Craig Brownstein)

Over the course of 2011, the site began to evolve into a reverse blog. Johnson and Brownstein are still posting, but they have added about 16 gay hockey bloggers from around the country who are contributing posts about their own teams.

“The amount of attention we have received has been incredible,” Johnson says. “We receive e-mails from several branches of the National Hockey League (NHL) teams such as media relations, group sales and operations.”

Just this past week, Puck Buddys was named 2011 Hockey Blog of the Year by Yahoo! Sports calling the site, “(Expletive) hilarious.”

Up next for Puck Buddys is a series of interviews on Zach, a gay high school hockey player. Zach has been skating since he was 3 and moved up through the youth hockey ranks and now plays for a perennial Midwest high school powerhouse team.

The first interview with Zack was posted Jan. 8 and the series will be a must-read for any sports enthusiast.

Meet up with the Puck Buddys at any of their Caps Watch parties at Nellie’s Sports Bar. You can follow them on Twitter at @PuckBuddys. Their blog site is puckbuddys.com.