The Best Business Writing 2013 by Dean Starkman

Author:Dean Starkman [Starkman, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: LAN008000, Language Arts and Disciplines/Journalism, BUS011000, Business & Economics/Business Writing
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2013-06-18T04:00:00+00:00

Joe Eskenazi

12. Top Five Ways Bleacher Report Rules the World!

San Francisco Weekly

Anyone with a sense of foreboding about the future of news in the age of search-engine optimization—writing about things that are already popular on Google in order to also become popular on Google—will feel no better, and probably a lot worse, after reading this profile of Bleacher Report. The sports “news” site relies on thousands of unpaid contributors writing opinion posts intended to tempt readers into a restless click. Its model is to crank out huge volumes of “content,” regardless of merit, resulting in serious swamps of digital dreck (e.g., “Twenty-five Wardrobe Malfunctions in Sports,” “The Twenty Biggest Criers in Sports,” “Ten Possible Tiger Woods Porn Spin-offs: Mistress Edition”). Perhaps uniquely among journalistic entities, as Joe Eskenazi writes, Bleacher Report has a “blanket policy” forbidding its writers from actually seeking out and breaking news. On the other hand, it was bought by AOL for $200 million.

Last year, sportswriter King Kaufman stepped up to the lectern at a symposium held on the Google campus. In a fourteen-year haul at Salon.com, Kaufman earned a reputation as one of the best and most cerebral sports journalists on the Internet. But his subject that day was his new job, improving the content quality at Bleacher Report—an outfit with a reputation almost directly opposite Kaufman’s own.

The San Francisco–based site is an aggressively growing online giant, tapping the oceanic labor pool of thousands of unpaid sports fanatics typing on thousands of keyboards. Launched in 2008, Bleacher Report meteorically rose to become one of the nation’s most popular websites and one of the three most-visited sports sites. Its dramatic success came via valuing site growth and pageviews over any semblance of journalistic “quality” or even readability. Operating a sports website on a supply-and-demand model turns out just as one would expect: High-trafficking Bleacher Report articles include “Twenty-Five Wardrobe Malfunctions in Sports,” “The Twenty Biggest Criers in Sports,” and “Ten 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.

“A lot of what Bleacher Report has done has been lowest-common-denominator crap, and horrible,” Kaufman admitted to the audience. His task was to alter this perception of the company. But this was not due to any sense of embarrassment or a late-night visit to the site’s brass by the Ghost of Journalistic Standards Past. Like almost every move the company makes, this was a business decision. And a smart one.

“This was not a decision made by the CEO, who got tired of his friends saying at parties, ‘Boy, Bleacher Report is terrible,’” Kaufman continued. “Bleacher Report reached a point where it couldn’t make the next level of deal, where whatever company says ‘We’re not putting our logo next to yours because you’re publishing crap.’ Okay, that’s the market speaking.”

Several thousand miles away, Bleacher Report’s hiring of Kaufman and a platoon of professional writers—but continued reliance upon an unpaid cast of thousands—was interpreted differently.

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