B/R’s Lead Writer Program announcement sparks media buzz

Bethlehem Shoals

You might have heard we had a big day at Bleacher Report yesterday when we announced the hiring of our five new Lead Writers.

Bethlehem Shoals, Matt Miller, Dan Rubenstein, Dan Levy and Josh Zerkle are the new Fab Five. Here’s a roundup of some of the coverage from yesterday and today.

Maury Brown of the Biz of Baseball wrote that while Bleacher Report “could have been happy with SEO driven page views, the company seems genuinely concerned about being seen as a top-tier outlet that can go after Yahoo!,SI.com,  ESPN, or FOXSports.com.”

MediaBistro’s Marcus Vanderburg, who often snarks about B/R, snarked in a headline, Bleacher Report Hires Five Actual Writers, and then wrote, “While I’m glad Bleacher Report has gone out and landed some household names, I’ll be the first to say I would have loved to see a little more diversity with their hires.”

That’s not an unfair point, and it’s one that’s taken seriously around here. Bleacher Report is hoping to improve on that issue.

Glenn Davis of Sportsgrid wrote a piece headlined “Bleacher Report Attempts To Transcend Ridicule By Hiring People Who Ridiculed It,” which he called “a smart move.”

“Quality of content was the site’s biggest problem,” Davis wrote, “now they have five visible people we all know can write. It’s going to make the site better.”

Matt Miller

“If nothing else,” he continued, “this is proof the site is serious about getting better. And when a site with a huge audience is striving to allow that huge audience to read better writing, well, who can mock that?”

There was a lot of buzz on Twitter as well, with reactions running the gamut from high praise to practiced trolling. I’ll just repeat my favorite tweet of the day, from TheSportsHernia: “Wow, Bleacher Report just threw some meat in the middle of the order.”

Bethlehem Shoals visited The [Blank] Jones podcast at the Basketball Jones today, where he talked about his new role at B/R as well as his involvement with the “post-punk sportswriting” site the Classical, which is attempting to raise funds for its launch through Kickstarter.

And finally, Matt Miller talked about Bleacher Report, Terrelle Pryor and the NFL draft business today on the No 2-Minute Warning podcast.