I was just curious if any Dopers are active participants/content creators for either of these two social sports reporting sites. I know there’s several people who spend a lot of time talking about sports and creating some long detailed content that’s pretty solid by internet honk standards. Have any of you taken any of that energy and channeled it into fan posts over on those sites? How was your experience?
I post over at BR all the time. It’s a pretty cool site. There’s some arguments at times, but for the most part, discussion is pretty relaxed and it’s a good place to read and talk about sports. (And some of the articles are hilarious)
Have you created any articles or do you just read and comment?
Just read and comment.
Like Guinastasia, I only speak as a reader.
It’s been a few years, but I found the Bleacher Report to be the smuttier internet version of sports talk radio. I stopped following links to there after awhile. Link bait featuring pictures of women somehow associated with the teams, dumb articles proposing trades that no actual GM would ever consider, and outrageous opinions written just to generate responses. Maybe, the quality has risen over the years, but at the time I was reading it that’s what made up the majority of the content.
SBNation, on the other hand has a lot of really well written stuff on it. It can run the gamut from stat driven in depth analysis, to whimsical fun conversation.
Personally, your long football posts are so well written and informative I can easily imagine you quickly becoming a highly read Bears/NFL blogger if you made regular updates.
I appreciate the feedback. We’ll see, I don’t post nearly as much as I used to due to a crazy work schedule, but I do like to hear myself talk…
I subscribe to the B/R daily Bears newsletter. It’s usually just a list of 8-10 links, half of which are to news articles from the SunTimes/Tribune and the rest are to decent B/R articles. I haven’t found B/R to be particularly smutty, though I don’t visit the homepage ever, only the Bears and other team pages. I do find that some of the articles are incredibly unnuanced and very loosely grounded in reality, but so long as you don’t try and confuse it with News it’s okay. The biggest complaint with B/R is the incessant pop-ups (begging you to sign up for a newletter even though I’m signed up as an example) and the over-reliance on slide shows to tell stories. Some articles should just be a simple list, I’m sure this is just their hacky way of padding page views, but it’s really infuriating. And naturally the website isn’t usable on a phone or tablet because of the pop-ups and slide shows.
SBNation is much much better, but I’m curious if the effort to write, edit and format a story is worth it. Considering the risk of plagiarism and image usage rights it seems like a burden.