Wright Thompson was just the latest person to mention Thomas Lake as one of his favorite current writers. John Walsh and Bill Reiter were the others. I think it’s time we take a look at something he’s done Check out this story from Sports Illustrated’s February 2012 issue.
The SF Weekly just published an article entitled “Top 5 Ways Bleacher Report Rules the World” describing how this fast-rising site has made itself one of the most popular and highly-read sports websites in the country.
For those that don’t know, Bleacher Report is a website, which was recently purchased by Ted Turner for $175 million, that uses around 6000 contributing writers, about 90 percent of whom are unpaid, to produce a ridiculous amount of daily sports content with the self-described mission of giving readers exactly what they want. They website has only existed since 2008, yet is the third most visited sports site on the web. Its rise can be attributed not only to its wealth of free content but also to its absolute dedication and sworn allegiance to producing articles with SEO magnetized headlines covering some occasionally not-so-journalistic topics. For them its all about quantity over quality, page views over journalistic integrity.
This excerpt was taken from a Deadspin article that also thought this was the most important part of SF Weekly story):
“One of the great ironies of Bleacher Report is that a site essentially founded on the mantra “for the fans” operates via an extremely regimented, top-down system. While nearly every major publication now has an SEO maven on board, Bleacher Report employs an entire analytics team to comb through reams of data, determining who wants to read what, and when, at an almost granular level. In this way, the site can determine the ideal times to post certain types of stories — thus meeting a demand that doesn’t yet exist, but will.
Reverse-engineering content to fit a pre-written headline is a Bleacher Report staple. “The analytics team basically says, ‘Hey, we think this is going to be trending, these eight to 10 terms will be trending in the next couple of days,'” says a former editor for the site. “We say thank you, and we as editors come up with the headlines and pass those on to writers to write the content…”
“High-trafficking Bleacher Report articles include “25 Wardrobe Malfunctions in Sports,” “The 20 Biggest Criers in Sports,” and “10 Possible Tiger Woods Porn Spin-offs:Mistress Edition.” The site quickly earned a rep for expertly employing the Google search engine to inundate the web with horrible, lowest-common-denominator crap.”
There’s plenty more to this story, and I sincerely encourage all of you to read the whole thing.
That said, I have a few of questions I’d like to pose to those of you who read the story: Do you read Bleacher Report? How do you feel about its content and does it represent the/a future of sports writing? Would any of you ever work for Bleacher Report?
And for the professional journalists on the blog: What do you think of Bleacher Report? Do you ever feel it threatens the sanctity (I know, a bit sensational) of what you do, or it just on your periphery? Do you see Bleacher Report as a competitor?
Sports Journalism 