Critics into converts? A former skeptic praises B/R’s internship

Gerard Martin

Bleacher Report: Winning the Internet, one critic at a time

In May, a young Notre Dame graduate named Gerard Martin wrote a Tumblr post headlined “My Bleacher Report dilemma.” In it, he wrote, “At its core, b/r is a content farm,” but declared, “Objectively, it’s brilliant. As a media professional, I absolutely see the value in this business model.”

But: “As a media consumer, b/r’s business model disgusts me. It devalues good writing and assumes that readers are dumb enough to read anything that mentions their favorite sports team in the title.”

He mentioned me, which is probably how I found his piece, because I ego-surf periodically, and talked about Bleacher Report’s potential to help young writers with its educational resources, professional editors and robust distribution platform.

His conclusion, though: “I like sports, I aspire to be a writer, but I have absolutely no desire to write anything on bleacher report, and that just kind of sucks.”

As Rodney Dangerfield used to say: Tough room. Kid won’t even capitalize our name!

But I responded.

“Gerard Martin, I think you should come write for Bleacher Report,” I wrote. “You’ll see how we do things, that we’re not a “content farm” …You wouldn’t have to feel like you were taking part in a business model you don’t believe in. It’s an internship, an educational opportunity, just like internships at many publications with very different business models.”

I told him that upon completing the internship, I’d be willing to bet that, even if he decided not to continue writing for Bleacher Report, he’d have learned something and his opinion of B/R would have changed.

He accepted the challenge, applied for the internship and—on the merits, not because of any interference from me—was accepted.

This week, Martin wrote a new post about how the internship is going:

My internship started two weeks ago, and so far, it’s been fantastic. I’ve had some issues in the past with motivating myself to write consistently (which is made fairly obvious by the frequency of my posts on this blog), so it’s been great for me to have regular deadlined assignments every week.

Honestly, I’ve been lukewarm on some of the topics that I’ve been assigned, but in every case, I’ve produced work that I feel really good about.

The best part of the internship for me has just been coming to grips with the realities on Internet sportswriting …

I’m learning how to balance the priorities of writing great content and making sure that people see it. I don’t [like] having to tweak my writing for search engines, but it’s a reality of the Internet. I’m realizing that in the grand scheme of things, it’s worth sacrificing a clever title or a winding lede in order to ensure that people will actually read the article.

Here’s Martin’s sportswriter profile.

One of the themes that emerged in the reaction to Bleacher Report’s announcement Monday of the hiring of our five new Lead Writers was that B/R is attempting to transcend ridicule by hiring the people who have been doing the ridiculing. Or, as one person tweeted, “Hiring your biggest critics to take your business to the next level – @BleacherReport is doing it right.”

But is that really what’s happening? It seems to me that there’s a pattern here: The closer critics get to Bleacher Report and the more they learn about what we’re actually doing, the more favorable their opinions.