Ty Schalter, Bleacher Report Featured Columnist

Six months after founding this blog—over two years ago—I received an e-mail from a Bleacher Report editor (long since gone). Said editor shared a link to a B/R article about Calvin Johnson, and suggested I write a post highlighting its awesomeness.

It wasn’t awesome.

I asked the editor about its lack of awesomeness, and indeed if he’d edited it. Further, I noted that with a few exceptions (like Greg Eno’s work), very little of the writing on B/R seemed to be awesome. He said the editorial staff was working ‘round the clock to buff out the scratches, and maybe if I was so keen on improving the quality of Lions coverage on B/R I should sign up and start writing—after all, anyone could.

I asked many of my bloggy friends (and bloggy role models) about Bleacher Report. I was vaguely aware that B/R had a less-than-stellar reputation, but didn’t know the particulars. I got an earful of the particulars. I decided not to start writing at Bleacher Report, but created a writer profile there . . . just in case.

Somewhere amidst all the Lions-y areas of the Internet, I befriended (e-friended?) Michael Schottey. Schottey was (and is) a card-carrying member of the PFWA, and as such had real pro writing and radio experience under his belt. He wrote about the Lions at B/R (and elsewhere) with both insight and skill, and pretty much was the antithesis of everything all the sports blog cool kids thought about Bleacher Report.

I found myself playing both sides of the fence: decrying B/R’s oceans of subpar content and lucrative syndication deals, while fiercely defending the quality of the work their best writers were doing. While the battle for blogger street cred raged on comment sections and Twitter accounts everywhere, B/R continually raised the bar for themselves.

Bleacher Report instituted an application process—no longer could anyone sign up for a free email, sign up for a B/R account, and see whatever they wrote syndicated to major websites within hours. As B/R became increasingly selective in adding writers, they also instituted policies against plagiarism, and instituted content and style standards—taking down substandard posts and banning the worst offenders. As the bottom rungs of the quality ladder were eliminated, Bleacher Report hired King Kaufman away from Salon.com to add a bunch of new rungs on top.

More and more excellent writers were coming to do great work on Bleacher Report, and the rest were being aggressively developed with amazing tools and training.  Finally, this week kicked off with what  newly-minted SI College Football blogger Holly Anderson called “Get That Paper Internet Monday”: Bleacher Report hired four of the very coolest Sports Blog Cool Kids, as well as their own Matt Miller, to be their national Lead Writers.

It’s a Murderer’s Row of OG sports bloggers: Bethlehem Shoals, best known for Free Darko; Josh Zerkle, best known for Kissing Suzy Kolber, Dan Rubenstein, best known for The Solid Verbal, and Dan Levy, best known for On The DL with Dan Levy. The sharper-eyed of you might recall that Dan kindly allowed me to guest-post on his blog, Press Coverage sometimes; I was (and am) a huge fan of his work. Dan’s intro post put it best:

In two months' time I went from feeling like I was doing Bleacher Report a favor by spending 30 minutes on the phone talking about their new program to sitting in their offices wondering how in the world I'm going to keep up my end of the bargain for a company I genuinely believe is going to be the next place everyone in our industry is going to want to work.

The only real problem with the way Bleacher Report has built their brand—something that has always been my point of contention—was that the back-end genius was always leaps and bounds ahead of the front-end product. To become the fourth-largest sports site in the country with no high-profile names writing for you, all while fighting a less-than-favorable (and perhaps a bit unfair) perception from certain media types, is beyond incredible.

The thing is, that back-end genius? It really is genius. And that commitment to improve? They went all-out to hire their harshest, smartest critics. They also promoted their own best and brightest; besides making Matt Miller a Lead Writer, they also bumped Michael Schottey up to NFL Associate Editor. He reached out to me—and in short order, I was trying to remember my old Bleacher Report password.

I shouted it out on Twitter already, but here it is, all dusted-off, updated, and officially official: my Bleacher Report Sportswriter Profile. You can check out my first post, there, too: “Jim Schwartz’s Detroit Lions Look to Stun Bill Belichick’s New England Patriots.”

Now this is the part I'm sure you're wondering about: the impact this will have on The Lions in Winter. I’m glad to say there won’t be one. TLiW was and is my very own; I write it because I need it. I didn’t chop wood and brew cider for three years just to let the little blue flame fade to embers.

B/R serves a different audience differently. It will still be me writing over there; you’ll see similar opinions expressed in both places. Occasionally, you might see differently-edited versions of the same article in both places. But, I’ll be writing about more than the Lions on Bleacher Report; I’ll also be covering the NFL as a whole. There will be lots of pieces there that wouldn’t fit here, and there will be lots of pieces here that wouldn’t fit anywhere else.

I've said and thought many critical things about Bleacher Report over the years, but today I sit blown away. These folks’ commitment to quality is remarkable, and the resources they put at writers’ fingertips are just as impressive. They are dead serious about doing what they do as well as they can do it, and I’m proud to do whatever I can to help them get there.

Technorati Tags: bleacher report,meta,writing,blogging

Read more...

Rock Music, and the Millionization of Sports Blogs

One of the many poorly-fitting hats I wear in my eclectic life is “Musician.” As a teenager, I played bass in a high school rock band that tried to evolve into a college rock band. Ever the information addict, I read books and magazines for pro musicians, talked to local pro musicians, and participated in musician Usenet groups and email listservs [youngsters, I’ll explain later], all with an eye on pocketing beer and ramen money by rocking through college with my closest friends.

Of course, there was no shortage of how-to info available; the record label-FM radio complex had been in place and unchanged for decades. Countless bands had played in bars, recorded demos, tried to get signed, gone on tour, and so on. Countless musicians had been chewed up and spit out by the system, with nothing to show for it but memories. The music business, I learned, was horribly corrupt, unfair, and exploitative. This article, “The Problem With Music” by producer Steve Albini was typed in, linked to, and emailed around countless times by older musicians trying to put The Fear into starry-eyed kids like me.

Yet, there was a sense of resigned understanding about it all. The system is horribly unfair, yes, and many talented acts never see a dime, even if they’re one of the 1% of the 1% of the 1% who cuts a hit record—but it’s unfair in ways everyone understands. If you play a bar gig, and you make people feel like dancing and drinking, you get more if gigs. You don’t, you don’t. Your recordings sell, you get to record more music. They don’t, you don’t. The correlation between what pulls in money and what’s artistically great is shaky at best, but for every dozen Ke$has, there’s a case like The Arcade Fire winning the Grammy for the Record Of The Year.

The upshot is that it’s practically impossible to set yourself up for life as a pop/rock musician. Getting lucky like that is more about being in the right place at the right time, and being what the market’s ready to consume, than it is about artistic or creative merit. In order to be a professional musician, you have to start on the bottom rung, look up the miles-high ladder with your eyes wide open, and choose to step on anyway. TOOL drummer Danny Carey gave the most honest, worthwhile advice about this I’ve ever read:

Q: How did tool get signed? Any ideas? How would you recommend getting signed?

A: If you are playing music to get signed, please do me, yourself, and the whole world a favor and quit right now. The last thing this world needs is more shit to filter through when we are looking for sincerity and inspiration in art forms. If you are playing in a band in your local scene and not developing a following, then you don't have a voice or a message that needs to be heard. That's not to say you should quit. You should just quit trying to please other people and play for yourself. Tool only played 7 gigs before the sharks were circling, looking for fresh meat to rob and exploit. The reason for this was every time we played, our friends went home and told their friends about the next gig, who told their friends about the next gig etc. until by the time we had done 5 shows, the clubs we were playing in were packed. You either have a chemistry that taps into the current or you don't. There is nothing wrong with playing heart felt music that is not trendy or popular but there is nothing worse than someone bastardizing or compromising their art for the sake of popularity and money.

This week, three of the biggest names in the sports blog world are stepping away from their primary projects. Dan Levy’s On the DL Podcast is sunsetting at show #555, Josh Zerkle won’t be running With Leather anymore, and Bethlehem Shoals is not just leaving seminal basketball blog/Socratic sports philosophy collective FreeDarko—he’s shutting the whole thing down. Yesterday’s On the DL Podcast featured both Zerkle and Shoals, and the discussions they have with Levy on the future of the industry is an hour’s worth of must-listen (if you care about that kind of stuff).

The sports blog world is in the midst of a huge transition. Just a few years ago, demand for online sports content was growing like crazy. Readers of the local paper’s sports section were going online, and finding a new world of opinion, analysis, and advanced statistics. Eyeballs swarmed around anything worth reading; the communities of popular blogs and forums served as a powerful social search engine for cool new blogs and forums. The result was something close to a meritocracy; the best writers kept the best blogs, and the best blogs drew the most traffic, and bloggers pretty much got paid by the traffic.

I started this blog right at the end of that happy, fertile period. I’ve written before about the “billionization” of the NFL, well, the millionization of sports blogs started shortly after I did. Blog networks started consolidating from the grass roots up; I joined what is now Big Lead Sports about six months in. Existing media powerhouses started acquiring from the top down. Recently, they started meeting in the middle, as when Fox Sports acquired Yardbarker. It’s no longer “media” and “online media,” it’s all the same thing—and, just as in music, creatives pulling the biggest total audience numbers are the creatives getting paid. As Spencer Hall said in FreeDarko’s goodbye post, “every successful revolution has to make the transition to governance,” and that’s exactly what’s happening here.

Levy and Shoals both cited their need to provide for their families as a primary factor for stepping away. They couldn’t continue to blog full-time unless it was providing a full-time income—and neither was attracting enough raw traffic to make that a reality. Unfortunately, people looking for awesome sports content are the ones who lose, just as music listeners everywhere lose when that cool indie bands’ members turn thirty-two and realize they’d like to have kids and own cars someday.

Even if none of these folks ever write or speak about sports again, there’s no doubt their current body of work will be remembered fondly for a long time, and their influences will continue to show in the way sports is written and talked about online. Having said that, each is already in the process of reinventing themselves, and I’m sure they’ll find a new, more sustainable role—either one that brings home the bacon, or one that can be played in free time and stolen moments.

As for me, don’t worry. This blog began when I already had a day job, a wife, and three kids. I explicitly set out to convert the time I always spent uselessly checking out football stuff on the Internet into creatively and productively checking out football stuff on the Internet. For that reason, I’ll never write as well or as frequently as I (or you) would like, and the site may never pull in big-money numbers. But I’ve been handsomely paid in new friends, great discussions, and incredible opportunities. It’s powerfully rewarding, and I don’t see it ending any time soon.

What happened to the musician thing? Well, our little band played a few open houses and talent shows, but after we moved out of our parents’ houses, we never found a rehearsal space. We’re all still incredibly close friends (the lead singer was even kind enough to marry me), but we stopped playing together . . . for the most part, stopped playing completely.

Then, a few years ago, our church’s praise band had need of a bass player. My old bass was just gathering dust, so why not? One thing led to another, and now I lead that band. Every week I get to play for the friendliest, most supportive audience any musician could ask for—and my kids think I’m the greatest bass player alive. Fame? No. Fortune? Definitely not. But satisfying? Absolutely.

Read more...

Tinderbox: Guest Articles at RoTL & Press Coverage

I’ve been fortunate enough to get a couple of guest posts up around the Web lately, and I’d be remiss not to let you folks know.  So:

After a too-long absence, I’ve rejoined the flock at The Lions Congregation!  DetFan1979 from Roar of the Lions has continued to host this Lions blogger roundtable, and the latest edition of The Lions Congregation discusses expectations, and how the Lions’ 2010 season measured up to them.

Also—and this is something I’m really excited about—I’ve written a post about the Michigan coaching search on Press Coverage, the sports media blog edited by Dan Levy of On the DL Podcast fame.  Don’t worry, Michigan fans, I think I did right by you.

Technorati Tags: nfl,ncaa,detroit lions,rich rodriguez,les miles,dave brandon,university of michigan

Read more...

Tinderbox: Many Guest Articles on the Way; links

I apologize for the lack of content yesterday; I added a thousand words to my CBA post, but it still ain’t close.  In the meantime, I’ve lined up a slew of guest articles, including a preseason game preview post for noted Steelers blog Steelers N’At, and a Michigan State season preview for College Football Zealots.  Plus, I’m polishing off a couple of long-overdue Leather-Bound Lions posts for Pride of Detroit, and of course submitting my contribution to the Lions Congregation over at Roar of the Lions.  Bottom line: I’m doing mad crazy phat writing, but I have nothing for you to read yet.  Next couple days are going to be stacked, though.  In the meantime:

Check out, if you missed it, Tom Kowalski's intriguing, terrifying article about the battle of the scouts and coaches—and how war is currently being waged over rookie CB Amari Spievey.

Also, I really dug Detroit News columnist John Niyo's article on Jon Jansen. As much as I love Jansen’s mind, heart, and resumé, if Jansen can beat out Gosder Cherilus for the starting spot, that bodes ill for Cherilus—and the right side of the line. 

If you thought the effusive praise on my most recent Fireside Chat for “Blood, Sweat, and Chalk,”  was just for the benefit of my guest, check out Peter King giving ridiculous love to Tim Layden and his new book:

Tim Layden, my SI peer and one of the most versatile fine sportswriters in America (the horses, the Olympics, the NFL), has written a book about how the NFL game has gotten as sophisticated as it has: "Blood, Sweat and Chalk (SI Books).'' I am not writing about it here as a favor to Tim, a friend of mine. I am writing about it here because it's one of the most valuable contributions to the understanding of the game we all love to come along in the 26 years I've covered the NFL.

Wow.

For those of you who are fans of the On The DL Podcast, or the quasi-defunct The Sporting Blog, Dan Levy and company are starting a new sports/sports media blog called Press Coverage; I highly recommend it.

Finally, let me give a little shout-out to my man Big Al Beaton over at The Wayne Fontes Experience!  He’s doing an actual, real, radio gig on Toledo’s WLQR right now!  Hit the WLQR stream to listen to Al right now. 

Technorati Tags: nfl,detroit lions,pittsburgh steelers,michigan state,tom kowalski,john niyo,tim layden,peter king

Read more...