Thank you for coming to the Bleacher Report Blog, which served the B/R community from 2007 to 2016. Starting in 2011, the B/R Blog was devoted to journalism education and discussion of issues of concern to early-career sportswriters. It is no longer being updated and comments are closed, but the blog has been preserved for those who wish to use it as a resource ..read more

Lars Anderson of Bleacher Report talked about two stories he’s written recently for the “How I Got the Story” video series. In both, the central figure in the piece had died. In the Shadow of the Super Bowl is about the grieving family of Don White, a construction worker and lifelong San Francisco 49ers fan who was killed in an accident during the building of Levi’s Stadium. The Final, Fateful Days of Lawrence Phillips is about the death of the former Nebraska football star, who authorities say committed suicide in his prison cell. Anderson had covered Phillips at Nebraska for Sports Ill ..read more

The second entry in our video series for Bleacher Report’s Advanced Program in Sports Media is up. B/R National Recruiting Analyst Sanjay Kirpalani joined me to talk about a pair of stories he wrote, The College Recruitment of Tom Brady and The College Recruitment of Russell Wilson. In the first video, Danny Knobler told me the biggest challenge he faces was that his subject, minor league home run king Mike Hessman, has a bland personality, which makes writing a colorful story about him difficult. Kirpalani’s subject, first with Brady and then with Russell, was plenty colorful: The story of h ..read more

I’ve started a new video series for Bleacher Report’s Advanced Program in Sports Media. It’s called “How I Got the Story,” and it’s as simple as that: A writer telling me how they went about creating a story or a series of stories, from idea through reporting and writing. First up in the series is B/R MLB Lead Writer Danny Knobler, who talks about his August 2015 piece “What’s It Like to Be Baseball’s Real Crash Davis?” That story was about Mike Hessman of the Toledo Mud Hens, who had just broken the career record for minor league home runs—as the fictional Davis had done in the movie “Bull D ..read more

Dorth Raphaely Bleacher Report General Manager Dorth Raphaely was a guest on the Copeland Coaching Podcast this week, talking about how to build a career in sports. Not a coaching career. Angela Copeland is a career coach, and Raphaely talked about his path, from volunteering in the sports information department of Division III UC-Santa Cruz as an undergraduate through CBS Sports Interactive and Yahoo before arriving at B/R in 2011. Oh, and by the way, he was also an assistant women’s basketball coach for the Banana Slugs. Whether he’s talking about covering sports or getting ahead in your c ..read more

We’ve all done it. Well, not you, but the rest of us have. We see a play go wrong for an NFL team, and we can see who screwed up. We diagnose the blown assignment or mental lapse and assign blame to the offending player. And really, unless we were in the huddle, we have no idea if we’re right. Seattle sports radio personality Danny O’Neil saw Seahawks lineman Justin Britt miss a block against the Vikings last week and tweeted about it. Yeah, Justin Britt didn't miss a block on third down so much as he ignored the defensive tackle. #Seahawks — Danny O'Neil (@dannyoneil) December 6, 2015 He la ..read more

Joe Yanarella A little bragging here, but with a message: Bleacher Report Editor in Chief Joe Yanarella has been named Digital Editor of the Year by Adweek. Adweek honored Yanarella, who became editor in 2009, for turning B/R from “a place where unpaid bloggers got an ego boost with a byline—and nothing else” to a place that “has ESPN and Sports Illustrated not only looking over their shoulders but in many cases trying to catch up with an editorial machine that’s laser-focused on social and mobile.” From the article, by Christopher Heine:  ”Journalism has been forced to keep up with si ..read more

While racism and threats to the physical safety of black students are the most important issues amid the unrest at the University of Missouri, a controversy around the rights and responsibilities of the media has lingered all week. As you know, the chancellor of the University of Missouri and the president of the state system resigned amid growing protests over the administration’s slow and tone-deaf response to a series of racist incidents and what black students say is an unsafe and hostile atmosphere for them on campus. Here’s a timeline of the growing tensions on campus at the Maneater, t ..read more

In the wake of ESPN shutting down Grantland last week, there was an enlightening exchange this week between Clay Travis of Fox Sports and Bleacher Report co-founder Dave Finocchio about the state of sports media. Travis, who was a lawyer before becoming a sportswriter, blogger and radio host, writes in his piece, On Grantland and Sports Media, that most of the analysis of Grantland’s demise has missed an important point: “the site was losing money.” He points out that the reported $6 million in annual revenue Grantland produced was less than sports-talk radio stations WJOX in Birmingham o ..read more

Two interesting journalism stories have popped up in these final stages of the baseball postseason. First, and more fun, when the New York Mets beat the Chicago Cubs in Game 6 of the National League Championship Series last week, the New York Times created an early-20th century sports page and populated it with Dan Barry’s delightful game story, written in the language of 1908. That’s the last year the Cubs won the World Series, as you may have heard. Poynter.org’s James Warren wrote about the story behind the story, interviewing Barry about the work that went into writing the epic gamer, whic ..read more