My Bleacher Report Review

While I'm not going to sit here and act like ESPN's ombudsman Le Anne Schreiber (who by the way is doing a tremendous job at the Worldwide Leader), or in the least bit act like the ombudsman of Bleacher Report, I wanted to give my thoughts on the mission and quality of this site.

The founders of this site—Zander Freund, Dave Finocchio, Bryan Goldberg, and Dave Nemetz—have done a phenomenal job creating an open source network where anyone can join and write about sports.

I want to stress the word write.  That's one of my problems with this site.  Too many writers basically write AP stories.  So many of the recaps and previews I read on this site look like someone just digested an AP and spit it out in "Bleacher Report" style (I'll touch on this in a little bit).  Most people just write, not report.

Bleacher Report writers, I'm asking you to provide detailed analysis of the game.  Show me something the AP story can't tell me.  Report what the crowd was doing. Report about an odd play or disputed call that influenced the game.  Report if the starting pitcher was leaving his fastball up in the zone or report if his attempt to establish his fastball for strike one was going nowhere.

This site is here to show off your personality, and a lot of guys don't do that.  At the same time there are a lot of impressive, talented writers on this site.

I don't want to seem as if I'm patting the back of a friend, but I don't want the work of Peter Bukowski to go unnoticed.  While I don't always agree with what he writes, I enjoy it because it's blatantly obvious the guy puts a remarkable amount of effort into each piece.  See his NFL draft preview to understand what I'm talking about.

This site needs more guys who do what he does and rightly deserve the thousands of reads he deserves.  Writers on this site need to feel free to write the way they want to write, not always in the "Bleacher Report Style," which comes across as a glorified AP style.

As much as I really appreciate those who edit my articles, it can be very annoying when the only thing changed is putting my article in BR Style.

I'm guessing the first person who edits this will start to shorten my paragraphs instead of trying to figure out how to make this sentence sound more astute.

There's a disclaimer though—too often on this site writers type out lists and other editorials that, to put it simply, have no thought behind them.  A good writer pours his time into looking up stats and stories to accompany his lists.  My favorite lists to ignore are "best fan lists" and "traditions lists."

The majority of the people who write these don't have any authority to really write them.  Hell, I probably don't have the authority to tell them they don't have the authority or credibility to write them.

I plainly ask the question to those writers: Have you lived in those cities, experienced all those traditions, or taken the time to watch all the things you write about?

The answer is probably universally no.

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