Bleacher Report Media Lab’s MJ All Day: An experiment in immersive entertainment

Bleacher Report’s Media Lab launched a Michael Jordan tribute site Tuesday called MJ All Day. As Media Lab director Bennett Spector described it, All Day MJ is “an immersive, highly visual, parallax website.”

“It’s a way to create an interactive feeling,” Media Lab project manager Will Leivenberg said of the site’s huge images, which reveal more as users scroll.

The site is unlike anything B/R’s done before. It was 10 months in the making, though the Media Lab crew was also working on other things during those months, Leivenberg told me on my SiriusXM Bleacher Report Radio show.

The Media Lab is charged with experimenting, trying new ways to entertain and inform B/R users. Talking about All Day MJ specifically and the Lab generally, Leivenberg said, “We’re trying to have a pulse on our audience, and that audience is first incredibly young, second incredibly mobile—actually I should say mobile first.” Almost 80 percent of young users use mobile devices for Bleacher Report.

And sure enough, the experience is much better on mobile, more like a video than something you have to scroll through.

Leivenberg said he doesn’t think MJ All Day will be a template for similar sites about other athletes, but that building it was a constant learning experience for the Media Lab team.

“The next time we do it it won’t take 10 months,” he said.