My Bleacher Report Review

I've always been for the little guy voicing his opinion and the developing role of blogs in the media, but the senior writers across the country have experienced all those things I asked above.

While I find lists generally ridiculous and a sensational way to get people talking about what you're writing, media members who have been around sport for decades have the utmost authority on making these "lists."

I touched just above on sensational writing, which is another problem this site has.  Too many awful sensational articles appear on front pages with 44 comments that completely bash the writer for penning an idiotic piece that has no fact-checking and opinions that almost no one agrees with.

On a different note, ESPN's broadcast story on John Challis (a very moving story about a Pennsylvanian boy who loves sports, but whose life is threatened by cancer) reminds me of another disturbing trend on this site.

It's almost guaranteed that if ESPN or another media outlet puts together a piece on someone like John Challis, the same exact story ends up on BR.  In my mind, if you don't give full credit to ESPN and don't add anything new to the story, you are borderline plagiarizing the story.

I don't want to make any guarantees, but Challis' story with every detail ESPN's Tom Rinaldi reported will be found on this site.  It'll probably be written by someone who's writing it as if they are reporting it for the first time.  Very rarely does the story give credit to the rightful source.

I've pointed out numerous negative points about BR, but I want to stress overall that this site has done, as my Scottish friend would say, "a bloody good job" creating an outlet for developing writers to express their opinions and thoughts.

One writer I want to point out who is developing as a writer is Alan Bass.  No disrespect to him, but I didn't think he was a very strong writer when he first started contributing to the site.  I thought he was writing things for the sake of writing things.  So I stopped reading him.

Then I kept seeing his name pop up on the front page, and I clicked on one of his articles.  To say the least, it was pretty damn good.  I read some of his other stuff, and it was again pretty damn good.  The guy found his voice and now is a leading contributor as a senior writer.

Ironically, after what I've written in this article, his last article posted is a list (but a well-researched list at that).

Some have gone above the mission of this site and reported real stories or interviewed leading members of the sports industry.  One BR writer who's excelled at reporting real stories is Bryan Thiel and the work he's done with his "Taking a T/O with BT" series, such as when he interviewed Darren Eliot from the Versus Network.

One last negative note: Folks, is it necessary to write an article reporting the fact you've gotten 13,244 reads on this site or written 50 articles?  Now I can understand a little if it's 100,000 reads or 200 articles or something that's really substantial.

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