Bleacher Report's Advanced Program in Sports Media

I'm sorry am I not allowed to change my opinion? Oh I forgot where I was posting.

 

Exactly.

 

Dammit. My plan to throw everyone off the trail so I can snag Bleacher Report's not-a-job has been exposed.

 

knowing the guys on here, I wouldn't doubt that it was true.

 

Totally.

 

While we all made fun of BR some years ago, I would not hesitate to recommend a good writer from there. King Kaufman and others have done a lot of work to make it more respectable. I doubt my editor would chuck someone's resumé in the bin because of the BR line.

 

Oh, I doubt it's because they're applying for the same job. The cyncism has sunk in pretty deep with some.

But let me say this: In the case of Bleacher Report, the fact that it's doing better work now - and it most certainly - is, in a sense, a kind of insult. Because what B/R did, in most cases, was just go out and buy good writers from other journalistic sources to lend it credibility. In other words, it creeped to the top with SEO manipulation and using workers for mostly free, but, when it got there and inked a deal with Turner, well, then, it had to get respectable, and it couldn't very well tap all the writers it had used over the years, could it? Those writers weren't good enough. So it went out and bought people who learned at shops where they were paid respectably enough and were mentored, in many cases, by other people also getting paid respectably well.

This rankles the shit out of people, because B/R swallowed up local traffic of Web sites with SEO and horsecrap slideshows - which hurt respectable news-gathering engines - then hired from those same news-gathering engines it hurt once they needed to actually put on a suit and go to a nice restaurant.

And there's something shitty about that. Lacking integrity. And as sort of broken as this place is and has been over the last decade, you'll find, underneath all that, is a cockeyed sense of integrity.

I suspect that's what you're running up against.

 

Judging from ptierney's post, if it hasn't changed much since then, anything you learn you are going to have to teach yourself.

 

While I disagree with the idea of editors tossing out resumes that might include some work for B/R on it, I would not go anywhere near that company after how they treated so many of the writers whose unpaid work they made millions on, as others have detailed in this thread already.

 

Here's what I'd like to know: How many top-notch writers has B/R developed themselves? It feels like all of their legit writers are ones they've hired away from other big-name publications. Doesn't seem like they encourage/allow for much growth for writers that start at the bottom in these programs.

 

I'll take a stab and say ... zero.