Are team blogs good or bad for the business?

This is an interesting subject I think. Do SB Nation, Bleacher Report, and Fansided are good or bad for the business?

The positives-

It creates more postions
Allows for greater discussion
Offers more variety

The negatives-
Most people are unpaid, or paid very little
The people who are payed are payed poorly. Fansided pays $1.10 per 1,000 page views if a site has 50 articles a month. That's not a lot.
People are writing articles seen as legitimate from the couch.

So are these sites good or bad for journalism in general?

 

You're forgetting one of the most negative aspects of blogs, at least to me and other writers I know on my beat: When blogs aggregate content.

Few things annoy me more. It's a regular occurrence with blogs that write about the team I cover taking something I got exclusively that's in a story I wrote -- typically features that I spent a couple weeks reporting -- and then pulling the best, juiciest quotes from it and putting them in block quotes in their post. Then they rewrite what you wrote. Most put in a hyperlink to my story somewhere within the post, but it is extremely frustrating to see the hard work and reporting you spent a lot of time on be shredded and used like that.

So in that regard, it's bad for journalism IMO. /rant

 

Bad. Really bad. Horrible.

The pay structures mirror pyramid schemes. At the bottom are a multitude of rubes who peddle clicks, which either generates ad revenue or piques interest from venture capitalists. That money trickles up to a small group at the top, which then redistributes a few crumbs to the lower level.

If that is indeed Fansided's structure (and I surely don't doubt it), that's reprehensible. 50 posts a month is a full-time job. At least, 50 posts worth a hoot a month is a full-time job. The quality of content reflects the pay, but the people running these networks don't give a damn. It would be one thing if these sites existed on their own island for hobbyists, but media outlets are adopting this model with worrying consistency.

I commend Bleacher Report and SB Nation for employing some professional journalists who have done quality work under those networks' banners. There seems to be an effort there to refocus on being legitimate news outlets, albeit more so in B/R's case than in SB Nation's. SBN still has an army of under-paid, untrained "staff" pumping out worthless junk or "curated" content. By the way, curate is a dressed up word for plagiarism.

Honestly, there aren't many positives. There might be more positions as OP suggests, but they're predatory in nature. There might be "more variety," and that might be great for the fan who wants his or her voice heard, but it's not journalism. Not even close.

 

I like it when people shred aggregation, but then there's an outpouring of love and romance for aggregators like Romenesko.

 

Awesome! Is there really this mysterious romance with Romenesko? I go there when there is a memo about layoffs or staff changes or whatever that he posts, but I couldn't care less otherwise.