http://www.sfweekly.com/2012-10-03/news ... hnology/2/
PEACEJoe Eskenazi wrote:Every publication has produced its share of jarringly bad writing. Yet Bleacher Report, powered by thousands of hobbyists and publishing more stories in an hour than many sites produce in a year, has lapped the field. The following excerpts of raw copy were all retrieved from the 2011 diary of a bewildered Bleacher Report copy editor:
• "From 2001 to 2008, we all know that Matt Millen, the GM of the Detroit Lions, were the worst in NFL history. Much to the instability from the coaching staff were the constant drafting of players who obviously could not play. This slide show is but a simple look at how sad our drafting process was in that 8 year span."• "An assessment over the last decade illustrates that last season was an irregularity, as many greenhorns fail to sustain success in their rookie campaigns. Despite this evidence, an affinity for adolescent ballplayers remains a universal affection among fantasy users. There are several arguments to explain why this empathy exists."
• "An assessment over the last decade illustrates that last season was an irregularity, as many greenhorns fail to sustain success in their rookie campaigns. Despite this evidence, an affinity for adolescent ballplayers remains a universal affection among fantasy users. There are several arguments to explain why this empathy exists."
• "Beasley still gets his average of just over five rebounds per game, but the Timberwolves do not ask him to circumcise his game by staying in the blocks the way Miami did."
Not surprisingly, critics from traditional journalistic outlets continue to knock Bleacher Report as a dystopian wasteland where increasingly attention-challenged readers slog through troughs of half-cooked word-gruel, inexpertly mixed by novice chefs.
Whatever, grandpa.
After denigrating and downplaying the influence of the Internet for decades, many legacy media outlets now find themselves outmaneuvered by defter and web-savvier entities like Bleacher Report, a young company engineered to conquer the Internet. In the days of yore, professional media outlets enjoyed a monopoly on information. Trained editors and writers served as gatekeepers deciding what stories people would read, and the system thrived on massive influxes of advertising dollars. That era has gone, and the Internet has flipped the script. In one sense, readers have never had it so good — the glut of material on the web translates into more access to great writing than any prior era. The trick is sifting through the crap to find it. Most mainstream media outlets are unable or unwilling to compete with a site like Bleacher Report, which floods the web with inexpensive user-generated content. They continue to wither while Bleacher Report amasses readers and advertisers alike.
But while critics' lamentations may be increasingly irrelevant, they're hardly unfounded. Perhaps uniquely among journalistic entities, Bleacher Report has a "blanket policy" forbidding its writers from seeking out and breaking news. A dictum on the site states: "While we don't doubt that some B/R writers have contacts they know and trust, a problem arises when we're asked to take a leap of faith that those sources are both legitimate and accurate." Bleacher Report is designed to engage in the far more lucrative practice of pouncing on news broken by others, deploying its legions of writers to craft articles — or better yet, multi-page slideshows — linking to its own voluminous archives, and supplanting original stories on the Google rankings. Breaking a story is no longer valuable: owning it is.
@ this faggot insinuating that sports writers know more about the sport than the professional players they are writing about. This type of thinking makes me sick.
pb
about pearlman being a douchebag opportunist though...i did not know that (only thing i know about him prior this article is that he was the one who broke the john rocker story i think)