Chicago meet-up: A heated time in the old town last night

Longtime B/R writer Bob Warja.

To paraphrase an old Rodney Dangerfield line, Bleacher Report writers went to a writers meet-up in Chicago last night and a hockey game broke out.

OK, not really, and not a fight either, but the conversation at our third Office Hours meet-up was at times heated. It was great.

We hold these meet-ups so Bleacher Report writers can meet each other and a few of us staffers during a fun night out, but also, as site co-founder and V.P. of Content Dave Finocchio mentioned last night, because we want to hear from our writers what the experience of Bleacher Report is like for them. What we’re doing right and, especially, what we could do better.

That’s where the heat came in last night at Timothy O’Toole’s Pub in Streeterville. We got some good suggestions and comments, and there was some disagreement in the room over whether various issues were problems or not, and how we might fix them if they are.

Community Manager Dave "Sweet Mo" Morrison lays down the law: You all get T-shirts!

It was all respectful and even good natured, of course. I’m kidding in making it sound like a fight. It was a lively conversation. And afterward more than one person said something like this to me: “That’s Chicago!”

The two main issues writers brought up were their frustrations with copy editors sometimes missing their mistakes, and with some of their better stories not getting the placement on Bleacher Report that the stories’ quality would seem to merit.

Those are both real issues that we’ve been trying to deal with at the B/R home office, and we’re going to think about them some more.

Update: See Copy Editing Coordinator Tim Coughlin’s comment below.

Internship Editor Joel Cordes drove in from western Michigan for the event, and Andrew Kulha, Community Manager for the Sports Writing Internship, came all the way from Detroit.

But a special Bleacher Report Blog shoutout goes to writer Saqib Ahmed Dadabhoy, who came all the way from Toronto, about a nine-hour drive. You can just see Saqib partially obscured at right in the photo of Bob Warja above.

I told Saqib to keep an eye out because we might be having a meet-up in Toronto sometime, and he said, “You have one anywhere in a nine-hour radius of Toronto and I’ll be there.” I’m thinking of scheduling a meet-up in Sault Ste. Marie just to test that theory.

Wherever the next meet-up is, my goal for it is to get some decent photographs, a task my iPhone has not been equal to so far. I apologize for the poor quality of the photos presented here. If anyone got some better pix last night, email them to me and I’ll post them on the Blog.