Kid writes for Bleacher Report, never gets paid

I also don't know how he was getting better simply by writing for B/R. If he's saying it's because of all those great editors, well, the editing on B/R is for shit, and the people doing it are barely higher on the food chain than he is.

 

Oh, I thought the headline said never gets LAID.

 

I would have read it had it come in at, say, 400 words.

 

Not all of the editing is shit. One of the former remote editors at CBSSports.com, a newspaper veteran with highly respected papers on his resume, has done good work for Bleacher Report. It's not like I can provide a link that shows the impact he's had, but the last time I checked in with him, he was improving copy as well as focus with the writers under his guidance. It's a small difference in the scheme of things, but he's made a difference.

Interesting timing to see this. It was a year ago today CBSSports.com laid off the entire remote copy-editing team it created 11 months earlier. The talk around the virtual water cooler was that the people making the bottom-line decisions were comparing costs and benefits of personnel to those of the likes of Bleacher Report in their quest to be more competitive and boost profits. They took note that Bleacher Report spent a fraction of what CBSsports.com spent on writers, travel -- and editing -- and could show more eyeballs coming to the site.

To the money folks at CBS Interactive, CBSSports.com wasn't being compared to ESPN.com or any of the network-based sports sites, it was being compared to Bleacher Report and SB Nation. To wit, these were the numbers of unique visitors to those sites in the month before the editors were laid off, according to compete.com:

Bleacher Report: 8.5 million.
SB Nation: 4.8 million
CBSSports.com: 3.8 million.

If you weren't bringing eyeballs to the site (and copy editors were not, of course), you were vulnerable to being deemed an expense that bore no fruit, unless you were serving other vital functions in the office. This was also around the time high-priced writers starting being laid off or moving on to other opportunities, including Freeman to Bleacher Report. As you all know, BR added others with traditional media backgrounds.

It was interesting that in different ways, BR was trying to be more like CBSSports.com, and CBSSports.com was trying to be more like BR.

 

I agree that it comes off as whiny and won't go over well if he wants to stay in the business. Thought the story you linked was just OK, but I think with some decent editors the kid could be a good writer. As for the "never work for free" views that always pop up on these types of threads, I normally agree. But I think for younger writers it can be beneficial to do it short-term, such as an internship, and that could lead to better things. But that doesn't appear to be the case at B/R. And maybe those days are over anyway, since hardly anyone is hiring these days.

 

Eighty-six hundred words.
The Magna Carta is 4,800.
Did Deadspin pay him for this?

 

Yeah, I wouldn't do it for more than a month or two ... I know it's not the same, but I got the job I've been in for almost 17 years by starting as a part-timer, busting my ass and proving what I could do. There is something to be said for getting your foot in the door, but nobody should work for free with any expectation of landing a paying gig.

 

I understand wanting to have your work published, but the write-for-free folks don't help anyone. Go to a freelance site, it's common to see legitimate posts with $3-per-hour offers or $15-20 for 1000-word pieces.

 

That... am I wrong that just wasn't very well written or edited? It goes on and on about some of the really mundane details. There's the line "To this day, I don't remember what he said," which both reads weird and seems to be countered by the last line. I get it that super long stuff can get stretched, but man, maybe some cutting.

As for Bleacher Report, it seems to draw a lot of folks in and just keep them going. I'm sure there's some interesting stuff in there, but it usually gets drowned out by a lot of sports shouting and the aforementioned slideshows. It always seemed like SBNation had a bit more meritocracy, but that could be because the differentiated blogs allow for better sorting of quality.

 

The internship was paid. The actual work was not. I think laws now prevent many free internships.