NFR - Long article on Bleacher Report

[btings]

During the transfer window there was a lot of discussion of Bleacher Report and the quantity of garbage its 19 year-old, unpaid scribes churned about on topics near & dear to our hearts, particularly the fate of a certain American.  There was a lot of discussion about whether BR should be included in the daily news threads, etc.

SF Weekly has written a lengthy (5000 words!) piece on the company and how it functions:
  http://www.sfweekly.com/2012-10-03/news/bleacher-report-sports-journalism-internet-espn-news-technology/

It's pretty much as bad as you'd expect -- even the topics that they write about are frequently determined by predictive SEO algorithms.

For a summary, you can check out Deadspin's coverage of the piece:
  http://deadspin.com/5948516/bleacher-report-is-the-worst-thing-in-the-history-of-journalism-is-the-headline-bleacher-report-would-write-for-this-story

[mccscratch]

Thank you for posting this....

I was often decried a fan boy over and over because I would simply say that anything from Bleacher Report was just BS written to get page hits... I knew the truth all along...

Not saying that everything they write is always garbage or not somewhat entertaining... they have some true fans who write but often it involved writers churning out stories about sports or teams that they actually knew very little about...certainly nothing in depth about them...

Often the authors of the pieces would be labeled as "insiders' for certain teams or sports when they had no affiliation other than being able to read the supporter message boards and cut and paste quotes and reports from the only somewhat more respectable journos in the actual city where the team is located...