Posted in News
7 comments
10/19 2010

How, And Why, Bleacher Report Is Smarter Than All Of Us, Combined.

Posted by Dan Levy.

“If you don’t like what people are saying about you, change the conversation.”

Some old ad guy once told me that, and it’s the model that Bleacher Report has taken to grow their business beyond anyone’s expectations. Today, Bleacher Report announced yet another content sharing agreement, this time with the Washington Post.

The Washington Post is now populating their website with Bleacher Report content. Let that wash over you for a moment. Woodward. Bernstein. The 20 Most Boobtastic Athletes of All time. Together, as one, as the overseers of journalistic integrity always imagined it.

But here’s why the Bleacher Report office is full of geniuses: their content is atrocious. It’s not just the smut they peddle in the form of slideshow after slideshow. It’s not just incendiary barbs fired at radio hosts that lead to hilarious exchanges we can run to make fun of both sides. It’s so much more than that. It’s the simple fact that I can log on today, start typing about my favorite team and have my opinions show up on Philly.com or LATimes.com or, yes, WashingtonPost.com. It’s insane, and it’s genius.

Look, I’ve had this conversation before with people from Bleacher Report. They swear it’s not as simple as signing up and becoming a featured contributor. They swear there are checks and/or balances that are in place to make sure they are only promoting their best writers. They do, in fact, have people on staff who have journalism degrees and have experience writing for mainstream media outlets. They do, in fact, have some good content on the site.

Good luck finding it, though. The morass of junk has sullied the Bleacher Report name to the point where no self-respecting internet writer would link to their content for the sheer sake of guilt by association (unless they are contractually obligated to do so, which some sites are). I’ve suggested to friends in the PR industry that B/R’s best solution is to change their name. Change, as it were, what people are saying about them.

But B/R took a different angle; rather than change what we’re saying, they changed WHO was talking about them altogether. It doesn’t matter if everyone “in the know” thinks their brand is tainted and the good writers and solid content is so overwrought with internet garbage that it’s not worth sifting through the dumpster to find what’s valuable when we can simply ignore (or mock) it. Honestly, does it matter what the “internet” says about you when your content is featured alongside Michael Wilbon, Sally Jenkins and Mike Wise? Who cares what a bunch of snarky Tweeters say? Who cares, for that matter, what the quality of your own content is, so long as it’s sellable? So that’s exactly what they’ve done.

Look, Bleacher Report has been fooling people for a long time already. Remember this post from September, 2009 where Fire Joe Morgan took to task a writer for compiling the “10 Scrappiest Players?” It was part of the triumphant FJM return to the blogosphere, volume one, and Junior eviscerated a guy who had been writing, at Bleacher Report, for all of five days.

They win. If they can fool the internet savvy FJM folks into thinking their contributors are mockworthy media alongside names like Lupica and Albom, it had to be simple to fool countless newspapers sites clinging to relevancy and in desperate need of cheap labor. What’s cheaper than not paying the writers at all?

So now the Washington Post, of all places, not only has a blog written by the fans, for the fans, but they’ve teamed up with a content sharing network populated by fans as well. They’ll still have the same great reporting — though far less of it than ever before — but the Post is one of the growing number of newspapers that have become so concerned with staying afloat that they’ve managed to marginalize their product to the point where they may not be the news outlet of record in their market any longer. Then what do they have? Cheap labor? Fans writing for them? It’s a brilliant model for Bleacher Report, to pray prey on the desperate. I wish I had thought of it.

For the legit news organizations? It’s pretty boobtastic.

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Posted on October 19, 2010 at 4:26PM
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  1. Philip Van der Vossen
    10/19 2010

    Is there something wrong with Boobtastic athletes?

  2. Ben Koo
    10/19 2010

    Great post Dan. People like to rail on B/R and rightfully so. At the same time their business plan is impeccable.

    Free content+refreshing ads+ syndication+ Google ownage = lots of revenue and little expenses.

  3. Jason Woodmansee
    10/19 2010

    Well, technically, they won’t be having any Bleacher Report stuff on their site – they’re just linking out to specific articles on occasion. I’m not defending it, but just clarifying it. [Full disclosure - I'm one of those people that is providing cheap labor for the WaPo fan blog.]

  4. gally
    10/19 2010

    I wish I had thought of it first.
    Me too. Me too.

  5. Ty
    10/19 2010

    Here’s the thing, though–content is still king. If the WaPo Sports page is Wilbon surrounded by a bunch of B/R links, people will eventually RSS Wilbon’s stuff and stop coming to the site entirely.

    Peace
    Ty

  6. Mac G
    10/19 2010

    Mike Wise can still pull out a good column, Wilbon, not so much. Since the WaPo is funded through Kaplan money, it kinda makes sense to partner up with Bleacher Report. Kaplan and BR both know how to rip of the consumer with a crappy product.

  7. Bleacher Report and the Washington Post: boobtastic! « Get The Picture
    10/19 2010

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