When CNN ditched Sports Illustrated as its in-house sports arm and instead went to new acquisition Bleacher Report last month, we were alarmed. After all, SI has decades of work attesting to its journalistic pedigree while b/r has this. We expected Bleacher Report to quickly drag CNN down to its "cesspool."

During tonight's All-Star Game broadcast by TNT, analyst Reggie Miller relayed an interesting anecdote about LeBron James as studied by Michael Jordan. The story came from, of all places, Bleacher Report. Timothy Rapp, Reggie tells us, apparently got the scoop of the century for Bleacher Report. Michael Jordan…

Nick Bond, writing for our friends at The Classical, recently went through the training program at Bleacher Report, a sort of orc pit out of which all B/R writers must climb before they write for the site. Bond's entire piece is well worth your time, but the best artifact is this horrifying paragraph, part of a lesson …

The Huffington Post mastered the science of gaming Google two years ago, with a post headlined simply: "What Time Does The Superbowl Start?" It contained nothing but the date and time of the Super Bowl. The concept was often imitated, but never duplicated.

We've all been there: Googling for news on, say, RGIII's knee only to find 873 SEO-optimized posts from Bleacher Report crowding out actual information. Posts like these:

It's been a hell of a year for the sexy ladies of sports. To celebrate, let's look back with a gallery of Bleacher Report's 25 sexiest "sexiest athlete" galleries from featured columnist Thomas Delatte, who's done more than his fair share for one of the most successful sports websites in the world. It's yeoman's work…

Say hello to Fancloud.com, a sports website in the Yardbarker Network that wants you to pay $50 in exchange for the opportunity to write for it. The three dipshits in the video above are the site's founders, and they can explain everything to you, but if you're not in the mood to have some wannabe Silicon Valley…

Earlier this week, the SF Weekly published a lengthy story by Joe Eskenazi about the rise and inner workings of Bleacher Report, purveyors of flavorless, pre-fabricated, market-based sports news. We thought the piece was great. Others thought the piece was not so great.

On Wednesday, we pointed you in the direction of the SF Weekly's long, excellent story about the rise of Bleacher Report. That piece discussed at length the process whereby Bleacher Report reverse-engineers its content based on data collected by an "analytics team." In short, the analysts divine the stories that will…