Headlines come pre-written from headquarters, and though the site has hired respectable writers in a bid to class the joint up, Eskenazi talks to current writers there who say they’re run through the grinder:
“I started out being worried that joining up with Bleacher Report would make other people think I’m a fraud and a hack,” says one high-level writer. “Now I’m worried I have become that fraud and hack.”
What’s creepy is the manipulation that is baked into the model here. Clickbait, SEO, slideshows, gamification, and the like. Computer models spit out story lengths, according to one source, and they presumably dictate, or at least heavily influence, story subjects, which are primarily about activating the lizard brain.
This is what people want, you say. Bleacher Report is just giving us what we want. Fine. But if it’s the market taken to its extreme, it’s sure fascinating to see how awful the results are.
And it pays to remember, this is what people “want” under the Web as it’s currently structured. Technology changes; models change. Assuming the structures aren’t locked in for good, we need to start to imagine what people will “want” under different models and technological structures. Because this one won’t do.
Won't do?
Aw, Ryan, why can't this be a happy story about entrepreneurs made good? Wasn't Bleacher Report dreamt up by a quartet of young knuckleheads in, like, 2007? So five years later they've each got almost as much money as Rush makes in six months! And all just by harnessing hot air that's expended in barrooms across this great nation anyway.
It's a hamster and a wheel that doesn't know it's either one of those things, spinning away on its own. Why NOT exploit that?
Free money--it's like free energy. A perpetual motion machine! And scalable too!
And no one even got hurt. Sports boorishness is ubiquitous but easy enough to ignore. Bleacher Report simply helps ghettoize it on the net, where non-idiots can avoid it. Win-win, if you ask me.
Yet, there you go again, running down the Future of [Sports] News based on your own prejudices about what people should want.
#1 Posted by Edward Ericson Jr., CJR on Fri 5 Oct 2012 at 02:00 PM
Mr Chittum, I tend to agree with basically everything you said, bar one thing: to a large extent, this "lets'give'what'people-want" policy was already ruling sports journalism far, far before the term crowdsourcing was even crafted. I live in Brazil, where the sports journalism is no more than an entertainment business, hyping weak teams, prasing mediocre players and stupid signings, and creating celebrities from nothing with the support of very lazy and unprepared journalists for a long time. The problem here, I believe, is that the users now are taking their place writing pseudojournalism babbling (Even if I believe that crowdsourced content can scale quality as the community matures, but this is another story). That's why this "cry for quality" came along now and not before.
#2 Posted by Cassiano Gobbet, CJR on Fri 5 Oct 2012 at 03:15 PM
Bleacher Report is NOT what the people want. Bleacher Report is a site that manipulates people into clicking on sensationalistic headlines. Sites like this exist and become popular because of search engines. The problem with a search engine is that you have to know what you are looking for before you search so if you search for news on something and there is no news, you get nothing. That is the opportunity that enables Bleacher Report to take a list of searches and use that to generate stories that people had searched for.
Since casual sports fans don't notice the difference in quality, they'll keep coming back to Bleacher Report and believing garbage they read there. Google could have fixed this problem by banning Bleacher Report from Google News and reducing the site's pagerank so it didn't appear in search results, but they chose not to do that. Because Google and the other search engines aren't going to do anything about this site, everybody else needs to stop visiting Bleacher Report (to lower their page views) and stop linking to Bleacher Report (every link to that site helps their page rank and moves them higher in search engines). When you write about that site, don't link to it (or at least make sure to add nofollow to your links) because that only helps them.
#3 Posted by Brad, CJR on Mon 8 Oct 2012 at 04:04 PM
It would help to do some research prior to writing a piece like this. Going solely off the SF Weekly article is the exact kind of amateurism that Bleacher Report is labeled with, yet this article is undeniably guilty of. Speaking with writers, past and present, spending time on B/R's front page, and perhaps gaining a wide variety of perspectives on the matter would help inform you.
I cited the CJR in my honors thesis a couple years ago, but am now shocked to know that this site/publication, which on the surface appears credible, produces content like this — disreputable bashing of a site it clearly knows very little of and took very little time to get to know at all.
#4 Posted by Will Leivenberg, CJR on Thu 29 Nov 2012 at 03:44 PM