Spoiler alert! This post is about warning your readers

Bleacher Report writers sometimes write about “spoiler” content. That is, events that have happened, but will not be seen by the vast majority of people until sometime later, usually a delayed broadcast.

Spoilers are OK at Bleacher Report. Part of what we do is write about things that have happened. We’re not really in the business of protecting people’s ignorance so they can enjoy a later TV show.

But we can have some common courtesy about it.

Almost all of the writers dealing with the spoiler problem are writing about pro wrestling, though in the past, the Olympics have presented big issues for some news consumers in the U.S. who wanted to watch the delayed broadcast of events on prime-time TV without knowing what happened.

Those folks have tended to get mad when someone spills the beans online, though why people who don’t want to see the news don’t just stay away from the web has always been a puzzle to me.

I am talking here about my friend Kati specifically, but there are others. I love this story, which—Spoiler Alert!—has a spoiler about “Citizen Kane” in it: At Salon, we once got an angry letter from a reader who was mad because, deep in a multi-page story about “Citizen Kane,” the writer had revealed that Rosebud was a sled. “I was just about to watch that movie and now you’ve ruined it for me,” the reader wrote. The movie was 60 years old at the time.

Anyway, this reportedly won’t be a problem in the 2012 London Olympics, because NBC plans to air every event live on one platform or another, even if it’s just streaming raw video. So there won’t be any such thing as spoilers.

But we still have big wrestling events, which are often broadcast after a delay.

All we ask of Bleacher Report writers is that, when they do write something that has spoilers in it, they clearly and obviously include the following at the beginning of the article or slideshow:

[WARNING: This content contains spoilers]

And this should be obvious, but experience tells us we have to say it: Keep the spoiler out of the headline, because you can’t warn people off of a headline. And there’s no need to add the spoiler alert to the headline of a story that has a spoiler in it. The above warning at the top of the story should suffice.

Here’s a fun piece about the History and Use of “Spoiler Alert,” by Nate Freeman on the Awl.

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Hat tip to B/R editor Adam Hirshfield. I cribbed some of the above from an email he sent to writers last spring.