Bleacher Report Raises 10.5M, Becomes 5th Largest Sports Website

@lono No, you intimated that pushing "boobtastic" stories and improving quality are somehow mutually exclusive. I think they are targeting different audiences.

SI, right now, has a number of writers I respect and a number of writers I think are poor quality featured on their front page. Meanwhile, "Extra Mustard," Brooklyn Decker, athletes in Santa costumes, and other photo slideshows are featured as well.

Meanwhile, you're judging an entire group of writers by who they write for, I think that's sad. The fact you don't see the logical fallacy in attributing your small sample size to a larger group is telling.

I think most about the writers who have gone through my internship, graduates of journalism places like Missouri, Syracuse, Northwestern, Berkeley. Good young writers who have excellent copy and good voices. You're discounting them only because they work(ed) for us.

@CousinJeffrey You don't see it as a stepping stone to better things, plenty of writers have and are currently writing with full time jobs at other media outlets. I've turned down a number of small/medium market sports writing jobs in the last three years because it wasn't worth moving my wife and family.

Not everyone fits into the "work an internship for free," "work a small town job for nothing" paradigm. If my two choices were move across country for 20K or stay home for 14K, I would pick the latter. (Or my wife would be very upset).

I'm not mad, nor do I think its foolish that people pick the former, that is their choice, their lives.

 

I should've specified I was speaking to the kid right out of college, or thereabouts, with no ties to one place. Obviously if you have a family it's different.

But for the single 23-year-old sportswriter, there's something to be said for immersing yourself in a job and community for a year or so just to see if you like writing, really like writing.

Sites like yours that give people a chance to develop their voice, basically for free, can be very helpful. I guess it all comes down to what you put into it, and honestly, how much actual ability you have. I just don't want young writers with potential taking the easy way out in that scenario.

 

You are absolutely, 100 percent dead wrong about that.

I am not judging an entire group of writers by who they write for.

What I am doing is saying that the overwhelming majority of content I've read on your site sucks. Period.

What I've read — and I've read far too much of it already — is written poorly, by people of limited writing skills, limited historical knowledge of the topics they write about and limited access to the subjects they write about.

I've yet to read anything on Bleacher Report that told me anything I didn't already know or gave me any new and fresh insights into the topics.

Sorry, but that's the truth.

 

As a matter of employment, a VC-related firm is a pretty bad place to work. Typically they promise great riches when the company goes public, but the chances of that are very bad. And the start-up culture dominates the VC set, meaning there's an assumption that you will work 70 hours a week or 80 or however many hours it takes to get the job done. Benefits, work-life balance, all that other shit is 20th-century economy stuff that VCs aren't interested in.

If you're in on the ground floor getting options and bonuses and such, and if those options ever pan out, great. If you're a worker bee, not so great.

 

This is my experience, too. You get what you pay for ...

 

@cousinjeffrey fair enough, and that's an opinion held by many. I just know too many people who were in that situation who are writing full-time elsewhere for me to hold that same opinion.

 

Sites like Bleacher Report, and pretty much all of the Demand Media properties, have found a crack in Google's algorithm and is exploiting the ever-living shit out of it with terrible content.

What this does is make Google less reliable and less credible. And it's only a matter of time before Google starts losing significant traffic to personalized referrals through Twitter and Facebook (I bet they already are, actually).

Then, Google will determine that these content farms are destroying Google's business model, and that Google is less a search engine that gets users what they want, and more a search engine which has content farms shitting all over their results.

Google's best and brightest will go to work trying to upgrade their algorithm to reward reputation and quality, and when they do, these sites are going to crash and burn.

I give it 18 months.

 

Actual Bleacher Report article

"Brett Favre: 15 Other Reporters We'd Like To See Him Send Sexts To"

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/488313-brett-favre-15-other-reporters-wed-like-to-see-him-send-sexts-to

Defend that one, Schottey.

 

Have they no shame? Have they no sense of decency?

I'm not being sarcastic with that paraphrase from the McCarthy hearings. I think that is simply awful. Hopefully Bleacher Report will be punished in some way for that and never do anything similar.

 

If karma actually works, somebody will sue them -- maybe Singleton's company that is trolling the Internet for copyright infringements -- and win damages in the amount of, oh, I don't know, just for a nice round number ... $10.5M.

 

Up next: "15 Keyholes Michael Barrett Should Look Through."

 

Are you suggesting that I enjoy (or even think well of) every article on a network of hundreds of writers? No. That isn't the case.

I'll go tell the intern who just got hired at the Boston Globe to re-sign because someone else on B/R wrote a sexting article.