What the anonymous writer seemed to be getting at was that the best Bleacher Report writers could aspire to be was Triple-A all-stars: dominant in their domain, and incapable of making an impact in the major leagues. A writer who knows how to make slideshows and write controversial articles that get a lot of hits and comments, but doesn't know how to break a story or even conduct an interview, isn't fitted for any other kind of work. They can't market themselves to large media properties, and they have the stigma of having written for Bleacher Report. Eventually, they become flotsam and jetsam. In this context, maybe I should have thought more about what happened after that A's game: The guys got off at their stop, leaving me on the BART train. And as a person who grew up in Minnesota and had never used it before, I wasn't exactly sure how to get home.

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Throughout my time there, however, Bleacher Report maintained that it was developing writers. A post from March 2013, aimed at convincing writers of the benefits of all their hard work, contains a video titled "BleacherReport—Writer Development." The opening screen reads "The Benefits of Writing @ B/R," and features four people:

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Miller is the last guy.

So, in short: a former college football player, an attractive college football analyst, an NFL draft talent evaluator, and one homegrown writer. The video doesn't really explain how writers are developed or the paths each person took, but does makes the company look like a great place to work. It shows their Google-esque office, the friendly employees willing to help out, and everyone having a good time doing what they love.

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The message they seemed to be sending to their contributors was that if you work hard enough, you could be the next Zach Rymer.


At the end of my time at Bleacher Report, I was writing six to eight columns a week. I would write at noon or around 4 p.m., or at both times if I had two articles due. I was writing about all four of Minnesota's professional sports teams and receiving assignments from four different editors. I also "freelanced" assignments, meaning they were written in addition to my normal ones. These were usually about the Twins, since I had access at Target Field.

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It took me a while to be accepted as a Featured Columnist for all four teams. In order to receive assignments from editors and have your work promoted through Bleacher Report's channels, Sean Swaby had to approved you to cover a certain team as a Featured Columnist. For example, just because I was a Twins FC doesn't mean I could just write about the Timberwolves and have my work promoted or receive assignments. I could choose to write about the Wolves, but unless I was considered a FC for that team, nobody would read my work and I would get no editorial help.

My editors were all "homegrown," so they had been through the grind. Joel Cordes, my NBA editor, is from Minnesota and covered all four teams from 2004-08 as credentialed media, so he was exceptionally helpful. And Doug Mead, my MLB editor, whom I have spoken to over the phone, was always willing to read my longer pieces, and became a personal editor in some capacity.

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The problem was that the editors held no power at the company, or so they said. At the time I left B/R, I had a long email exchange with Cordes in which he claimed he was pulling for his writers to be paid, to no avail. They were purportedly also not told about a lot of things like, for example, why the company was using outside sources instead of their own Featured Columnists in internet videos and other B/R media, or why the B/R brass was hiring from the outside instead of promoting the best FCs.

At the time, I was doing what I wanted to do—for the most part. I really enjoyed working with my editors and my writing improved drastically because I was working with four different people ... even if they were incredibly busy handling all the writers in their respective leagues. The trouble was getting access.

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I had a good relationship with the Twins, a contact I had made through my uncle who knew a person in the front office, so that always worked out well. I got into a Wild game, but the old NHL editor filled out a form wrong, so the team accused me of sneaking into a game. With the Wolves, I got credentialed through Paul Swaney to do a stadium review for Stadium Journey and introduced myself to the Wolves P.R. staff. They granted me access despite initially getting resistance from B/R, which said that it had a new policy where only Lead Writers and paid staff get access to certain events.

It was difficult to hear given that, well, at around that time I was supposed to be granted an interview for a paid position.

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By May 2013, I had reached Featured Columnist III, at which point I had to contact Jeff Chase, the community monitor, and have him manually change me from a Featured Columnist II to Featured Columnist III on my sportswriter profile. I assumed that after Chase had changed my profile to reflect that I was a Featured Columnist III, I would be asked to come in for an interview. I had planned to see college buddies up in San Francisco, and thought I would swing by the office and see what they had in store for me.

I emailed Adam Hirschfield, Bleacher Report's deputy editor, with whom I had maintained contact since my internship, and asked him what opportunities were open for Featured Columnist IIIs. He did not give me a direct answer, telling me to email each of my editors as well as Tim Wood, who left the site around the time I reached Featured Columnist III. After asking around, I found that there were no paid opportunities available. The NHL editor, Scott Campbell, told me I could get paid $200 to write 10 NHL draft features. This was the only paycheck I ever received from Bleacher Report after my initial paid internship.

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The thing about this was that I was generating viewership for the site. I got about 10,000 hits on my Vikings articles, 5,000-10,000 on my Wolves stuff, and 1,000-2,000 on the Wild and Twins content. (Keep in mind that most of B/R's hires are in the NFL department, because it is such a popular sport, and in the NBA due to their Turner affiliation, and that MLB and the NHL are less emphasized.) In all I was getting at least 20,000 to 30,000 hits a week, if not more, while providing strong localized content, which is difficult to find. At the very least, I felt I deserved a stipend.

Even though I continued writing for Bleacher Report, I was becoming very suspicious about what was going on there. Why was I not getting paid despite generating so many pageviews? Why was the promise that people who reached Featured Columnist III would get a job interview suddenly pulled off the site? And why, when I emailed Adam, a person I knew from the office who had told me that with the Turner acquisition there would be more jobs available, did he not know whom I should speak to about getting a job at B/R?

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There were also plenty of other media sources writing about Bleacher Report at the time, and none of what they had to say was positive. Nick Bond discussed the seven stages of grieving at Bleacher Report University for The Classical, Will Leitch wrote about how B/R was gaming the system for Sports on Earth, and, of course, Joe Eskenazi had done his investigative piece for SF Weekly. I had also been casually following a blog called The Bleacher Report Report, which I had discovered in a June 17, 2013, Deadspin post.

In September 2013, B/R Report's anonymous author posted an article in which he quoted Tim Wood as saying that he did not think a young, homegrown writer would ever get paid at Bleacher Report. "Turner wants to homogenize the site," he said. "They know TV and TV is built around brand name personalities, so that's what they want from BR. That goes against everything I loved the site for when I signed on and against everything we were building. I don't foresee a good future for the young writer trying to get paid at BR."

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Those writer rankings, it turned out, were a sham too. "Climbing of the ladder was not as structured as I wanted. I was always asking for more money. I wanted more tiers of paid writers, so the paid writers could see they were rising [in] the ranks," he wrote. "That was the five-year plan when I signed on for the gig. I think that if we had continued without Turner, we would have created those tiers. I had budget approval to create more tiers, but it was pulled back when the Turner talks began."

It was at that moment that I realized I was being played. Bleacher Report was making a ton of money, and they could afford to pay me and other people that had reached Featured Columnist III. They just chose not to.

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At this point I wanted answers and I knew I was not going to get them from Adam or anybody else at Bleacher Report, so I decided to reach out to "Bleach," the anonymous author of The Bleacher Report Report, to see if I could learn any more. It was Bleach, not anyone I had worked with during my B/R internship, who told me to reach out to King Kaufman, the manager of the writer program at B/R, and ask for a stipend. He told me he thought they would pay me, since the company had previously come out and said that it paid stipends to longtime writers in order to help them out until they found a permanent job.

On Oct. 7, I emailed King Kaufman, explaining that I covered four teams, was getting good viewership, and had reached FCIII four months prior, and requesting payment for my writing.

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His response was as follows:

Thanks for checking in. I've discussed your note with all relevant editors, and I'm sorry to report that there are no paid opportunities for you at B/R in the foreseeable future.

We appreciate all you've done for Bleacher Report over the years, and we'd be happy to have you continue to contribute in an unpaid role if that's what you want to do.

I realize this sounds harsh and it's tough news, but paid writing slots at Bleacher Report have become very competitive.

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Bleacher Report had just hired people away from CBS Sports, The New York Times, and ESPN. The site had just lost a slew of high-profile outside hires—Ethan Sherwood Strauss, Zach Harper, Holly Mackenzie, and Jimmy Spencer, in addition to guys like Dan Rubenstein and Bethlehem Shoals—and had money to spend. It was hard not to think that management saw all of their longtime contributors as expendable: If you leave, we'll just use all the money generated from our unpaid writers to land a guy from The New York Times or ESPN.

In short, there appeared to be three types of hires: homegrown staffers whose job was half writing and half P.R., prominent bloggers paid to stop complaining about the site to his or her followers, and people from established companies whose purpose allowed B/R to say, "We got a former ESPN person."

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I felt I had become nameless and faceless to Bleacher Report management—just one more drone pumping content to get clicked on. I thought back to that text Finocchio sent me before my 21st birthday, the one where he said "Black Hole Sun" was my future: In a way, it was more prescient than I could have ever imagined.

Following the release of that song in 1995, Soundgarden did an interview with Rolling Stone where frontman Chris Cornell talked about the toils of the music industry:

It's really difficult for a person to create their own life and their own freedom. It's going to become more and more difficult, and it's going to create more and more disillusioned people who become dishonest and angry and are willing to fuck the next guy to get what they want. There's so much stepping on the backs of other people in our profession. We've been so lucky that we've never had to do that.

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That is exactly what is happening at Bleacher Report. Many young writers, unable to find a job with the newspapers or other media outlets, join B/R hoping to hone their voice and develop their writing while making enough money to keep the dream alive. Instead, they are strung along while their work subsidizes the salaries of better-known talent from established publications and not really given a place to go once they are good enough to generate traffic with longer articles. They're not considered a Sports Illustrated, Grantland, or Sports on Earth-caliber writer, but they're also no longer beginners. They just get lost in the middle.

Every time a major event occurred, I always thought back to my discussion with Finocchio. I liked the idea behind the site, giving a voice to the die-hard fan in hopes of creating better local content on each team, but wondered if that would ever come to fruition. Bleacher Report could be a place where you would find unique, salaried writers—perhaps a die-hard Cleveland Indians fan, a hockey fan from Miami, or somebody who likes the Charlotte Bobcats more than the UNC Tar Heels.

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Instead, the people who get paid are the exact ones that Finocchio didn't want to read as a displaced Bay Area sports fan going to school in South Bend: those who cover all 30 teams or only the "national teams." I saw myself as a person servicing Minnesota sports fans who live in the Twin Cities, as well as those who live elsewhere and still want to follow their teams. In my mind, I was following the model Finocchio laid out when I spoke to him over three years ago. There may have been red flags along the way, but I was sure it would work out in the end.

"It's really valuable to have people out there that we've had a positive experience with," Finocchio told me in his parting words back in August 2010, "and they've had a positive experience with us."

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Tom Schreier writes for 105theticket.com and can be heard on The Michael Knight Show from 2-3 p.m. on weekdays. He has written for Bleacher Report and the Yahoo Contributor Network. Follow him on Twitter @tschreier3.

Art by Jim Cooke.