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

@golfnut8924 You should have learned, at some point, that it is poor form to impute motive--especially to someone you have very little past experience with.

"Desperate" "Pathetic" "Boasting" are three things that had no part in my OP. That is just you assigning the worst possible motives to an action. Thanks BTW...'tis the season.

Sorry if you feel it was inappropriate, but don't assume you know me and my motives based on an internet post.

Frankly, I posted it because I felt it was a "journalism topic" and fit right along with recent postings re: Gawker and SB Nation and I enjoy reading feedback--good and bad.

 

I actually had no problem with the post...... until I found out it had come from a BR employee.

 

While I think Schottey is a clown for not recognizing that all the shitty writes poison the site's reputation for the good writers, the people who don't think there are any SEO practices or habits to hone are equally as foolish. There's a new way of delivering news, folks, and it's not on your doorstep.

 

i miss andy

 

How's he doing Schottey?

 

I had to go search the SJ archives to see who you were talking about. Andy Auger was (in my personal opinion, not the company's) a troll. He doesn't write for B/R anymore. A quick google search shows that he's on a fan blog for the Seattle PI.

 

With the disclaimer that we do business with B/R, I'm not sure why all this animosity is being directed toward Schottey, for this simple reason: It's clear who he works for, he defends what they're doing because he works there, and there's nothing hidden in what he's saying. Somebody knocked him on page 1 for "pimping" for B/R, but I agree with him: He's simply informing; not sure how that's pimping. He's behind what his company is attempting to do, and I can't knock him for that.

You can hate his site and what it's doing, but there's no dishonesty on his part here.

 

Bleacher Report is a joke, plain and simple. I wrote for the site (not for the sake of the site, but to gain clips for myself and use it as my own blog. When I decided after a year I would stop writing for them, all they said was "It's sad you're leaving in the middle of a great season..." Really, B/R? I put up some damn good material for a year and that's all I get? And when I asked if I could obtain a paid position, I was told that none were available. Of course they weren't.

Funny how I actually had it on my resume and had a link to my "profile" in my cover letter I sent out. Guess how many jobs I obtained with that resume/cover letter combo? NONE. When I changed around my resume after noticing this consistency, I started getting more responses. No surprise there. B/R is a complete joke of a sports website and it's not real reporting; it's a bunch of shitty bloggers who can't write worth squat.

I hope the company tanks quicker than Enron.

 

The quoted material in the OP talks about how BR is passing up Yahoo and Sports Illustrated and CBS Sports, etc. But the question is, where would BR be if it weren't for those sites? CBS and ESPN are the ones out there getting dirty and getting the stories. The folks at BR just sit back and regurgitate all that info and then want to take credit for it. Do the BR "reporters" ever actually get off their asses and cover something themselves or dig up their own stories? Or do they just sit around and post links and keywords and shit? It seems to me that they let everyone else do all the dirty work for them. Laziness.

The OP wanted to start a discussion about BR's "success" and seek out our opinions. Fair enough. But don't get offended when we give it to you. Ask and you shall receive. Go back and read this thread from the beginning. Do a forum search for "bleacher report" and read some past discussions. Go into any news room in America and utter the words "bleacher report" (and then duck). It's not hard to see what traditional journalists think of BR.

 

Given the headline and the reason for his initial post, what he's doing is not so much defending and informing as it is bragging and saying neener-neener to the old-world workers on whose backs he has built his "content."

 

You know, it completely went past me that he was the guy who made the initial post. That kind of changes things a bit.

 

In the old days, newspaper publishers would push out the "old timers," which is to say writers who had been around for seven years and had reached top scale, and replace them with eager, know-it-all J-school grads who would gladly do the work plus some free overtime for bottom scale. Readers didn't say boo.

Now, giant Internet companies that need to feed the beast have discovered they can get away with "user-generated" content and don't really need to pay writers at all. Readers aren't saying boo.