Clicks and Misses: My Year Writing For SB Nation
After Deadspin dropped a bombshell exposé, I decided to set the record straight on my year contributing to Sports Blog Nation
46,306.
That’s how many words that, up until this point, have been published under my name for Bolts From The Blue, SB Nation’s blog about everything Los Angeles Chargers.
According to Fortune — the magazine focused pretty much on what its title entails — Vox Media, the digital media company that owns SB Nation, has become “a startup ‘unicorn’ worth more than $1 billion” in recent years. This has mostly been under the guidance of current CEO and former AOL executive Jim Bankoff, a guy reportedly dedicated to expansion through ad sales.
Guess how many of the ten digits in Vox’s bank account have come my way over the 388 days since my SB Nation account became activated?
Exactly zero. As in zilch, nada, or zip.
And herein lies the debate.
It’s been some time since Laura Wagner and Deadspin first published her article titled “How SB Nation Profits Off An Army Of Exploited Workers,” an article a little more level-headed and journalistic than the title might imply.
Fair warning: Wagner certainly did not have a word limit in what proved to be quite the lengthy read. However, if you fancy yourself a fan of online sports content — and SB Nation in particular — then the piece is absolutely worth glancing at.
Nevertheless, if you don’t have the thirty minutes or so it took to finish her article, I think the best way to describe it is as a traditional, by-the-numbers exposé. Anonymous reports and confidential conversations pop up with consistency, establishing an intriguing look inside the media that so desperately tries to shun the idea of corporate practices. Better yet, the article features quite damning conversations from executives all the way up the Vox Media food chain.
Even if she attempts to paint a balanced picture, Wagner’s critical bias rings pretty clear throughout. After all, she does write for a rival website that would love to shed its opposition in a negative light as often as possible. I mean, SB Nation has similarly slung mud right back at them in the past as well.
Though I find she hits on quite a lot of points — something that’s bound to happen when you push 8,000 words — the journalist from Deadspin leaves a bit to be desired. As a contributor to SB Nation, I’ve gotten an up-close and personal look at what it means to write for one of their blogs, something that (I’m fairly certain) Wagner never did experience.
And that’s exactly why I’m here to set the record straight.
Back in 2013, when I was a freshman in high school, I discovered SB Nation for the first time.
It wasn’t exactly organic, as I found the sports news website via the link-dumping, money-printing behemoth we know as Bleacher Report. The page that focused on the Chargers would constantly feature articles from Bolts From The Blue, or BFTB for short.
Soon enough, I would stop logging on to B/R altogether in favor of what I deemed to be a superior product in SB Nation.
The community, the laid-back and casual approach to journalism — these are the things that drew me into checking BFTB one, two, sometimes even three times a day. Not only did I comment on the most recent articles from fellow fans spanning the globe, I even started contributing articles to the site — stylized as ‘Fanposts’ — to a decent response from my fellow blog members.
Time passed, and I started to take in what many might consider an unhealthy amount of online sports content on a regular basis. Parallel to this addiction grew my love for writing, as I formed a greater interest in English class.
I would read stuff from all over the interwebs and note the clear amateurism it took to write for one of these websites. Many an article would feature blatant transgressions of the laws of grammar. I knew I was capable of clearing the bar, so I figured, Hey, why not try my hand at this?
Unfortunately, BFTB wasn’t accepting applications in May of 2016. So I settled for the next best thing: FanSided’s Bolt Beat.
I never was a fan of Sports Illustrated’s attempt to replicate the successes of their media rival, both from a content and aesthetics perspective. But I found the blog to have a loyal following in the two months I wrote for them, with my total output coming out to six articles.
Of course, I still made sure to keep up to date with everything from BFTB, and when a “Looking For New Contributors” post popped up, I hopped right on it. In applying for the position, I was allowed to include previous work, so I figured linking my articles from FanSided would give me the upper hand among the competition.
To say I was ecstatic to receive the position would be an understatement.
A s I hope I’ve established so far, I loved SB Nation. I looked up to the guys who regularly posted since, to a younger fan like myself, their ridiculous amount of knowledge relating to the team caught me up to speed on all things Chargers. They had a air of legit-ness to them, even if their writing could be subpar at times. But nowhere else on the Internet could I find such a controlled and consistent culmination of pure fandom.
A key thing resided in that first welcome email: this would be an unpaid job. The site manager set the precedent, though, informing me that it could still be beneficial writing for the blog due to the exposure and the possibility of “future paid openings.” I responded with a resounding All good with me! I was seventeen, and I worshiped the very thing I’d now be a prominent part of. That alone was compensation enough.
Once my SB Nation account was upgraded to have editorial capabilities, I was added to the BFTB Slack, a messaging app used for coordinating groups in all sorts of workplaces. All of the contributors from the blog were in the Slack, something I now know to be commonplace among SB Nation sites. They were friendly in welcoming me, and just like that, it was down to business. The 2016 season was coming up, after all, and the Chargers were embroiled in highly controversial and very public battles with Joey Bosa’s camp and the city of San Diego. Add in the ugly way in which Eric Weddle was ousted from the franchise, and there was all sorts of fodder for me to write about.
Charged with the excitement of working for the blog (pun intended), I churned out quite a lot of articles in the first several weeks. They hired me in mid-August, and I returned the favor with five posts in two weeks.
I had to get out to a hot start in my SB Nation writing career, because soon enough, school would start and I would become extremely busy with sports, college applications, and, ya know, school. Plus, in my email to my manager, I had promised to write 1–2 articles a week, and I didn’t think it would be a good look to slow down so shortly after being “hired.”
Then, something peculiar happened. A week or two after I was welcomed into the Slack, several new messages stylized in a similar vein popped up, welcoming new writers to the staff. I found it odd, as I figured I beat out the competition in claiming the rare opening.
Then I realized — I was just as replaceable as the next guy.
I know, I know, no need to get overly dramatic. In the past year, however, I’ve begun to fully appreciate the SB Nation business model.
Just like I did in my first couple weeks writing for the blog, most newcomers come in and fire out a steady stream of articles, keeping the promise they gave in their application. Nonetheless, life gets in the way, and it’s hard to keep that kind of output up when driven by nothing more than “fandom,” which isn’t exactly the most quantifiable of measurements.
Now, there are some outliers, guys who do stick with their respective team site over time due to their absolute passion or feeling of loyalty. Most writers, though, see their contributions plummet after their initial outburst. Coinciding with this is usually a complete disappearance from all forms of conversation in the Slack.
I’m certain that some nerdy math-type working for the company has a clear-as-day graph depicting the inevitable drop-off from their authors. Therefore, SB Nation isn’t interested in waiting for your work week to slow down. They’re always looking to ride that next wave of fresh faces and get more and more content out there in the public domain. Because, of course, more content means more views, and more views means more money lining their pockets.
It’s easy when logging onto one of SB Nation’s blogs to instantly lament the writing, but quality will always be sacrificed when quantity is the number one priority. Try and start a company where the workers are told that their compensation for arduous work begins and ends with the satisfaction of upping their love for the brand and see how quality fairs. I have a hard time believing that said startup will ever break into the Fortune 500.
In that sense, I think Vox truly fosters a poor working environment.
Even with my decline in posts, to this day, I’ve published thirty-five articles for Bolts From The Blue, equating to roughly .65 articles per week. Though nowhere near my initial promise of one-and-a-half articles a week, my metric places me roughly in the middle of active contributors to the site.
In addition, I found my niche position on the staff quite quickly. There were enough guys covering the more daily news of the team, so I went the editorial route, creating pieces leaning more towards opinion and more open to stylistic flourish. Nevertheless, this type of writing takes a lot of thinking, typing, trashing, typing again, trashing again, and editing before the final submission. This process can take six, seven, maybe eight hours, and that‘s if I’m on task and focused.
Though I’ve gotten less finished products out there, I’ve still put in a considerate amount of time. Besides, my articles are about 500 words longer than the average post, so in the end, the actual work among me and fellow contributors more or less evens out. Even if I’m not a terribly valuable commodity for a company that prefers views over reads, I sure stack up more favorably than it appears on first glance.
Why am I talking about all of this? Well, back to my point about being replaceable.
I landed a good gig with BFTB because, luckily for me, there’s a ton of other guys willing to grab a bit of something here and there. I can stay focused on my line of writing and not have to worry about my “job security,” if you will.
This isn’t the case at many of SB Nation’s blogs I’ve logged onto in the past, as the non-football sites are wildly-inconsistent in terms of viewership. For some, you can count the amount of writers on your fingers. For others, there’s the site manager, and that’s it.
Many of the stressed-out site managers Wagner described in her article were responsible for constantly updating their respective blog all by themselves, and if they did have help, it was slim. These managers don’t have the luxury of other contributors picking up the slack when they’re busy, and would therefore have to break news while at their everyday jobs. One manager even told Wagner that the constant demands from uppity-upps to produce more and more content even ruined some of his relationships, as he would have to skip out on hanging out with friends in order to find access to a computer screen and a keyboard.
Sure, these people get to keep the reported $600 monthly stipend Vox grants to every site manager all to themselves. But when you’re constantly putting time into something that pays worse than minimum wage, at a certain point, the money doesn’t really cover it.
So I get where Wagner is coming from when telling the stories of those who’ve seen the ugly underbelly of the thing I once admired without question. Yet my personal experience has been smooth sailing in comparison, as the only thing pressing me to contribute more is my manager’s constant posting in the Slack, asking Who can write today? It never feels too forced, either, as he’s a nice guy always willing to chop up some Chargers Football with the rest of us infidels.
There might be a greater sense of urgency to produce content if I were dependent on the income, but of course, that’s not a problem. I even think the fact that I’m not paid takes the pressure off, as the process doesn’t feel like an official job. I could walk out the door, and nary a person would notice. In that sense, I am indeed just as replaceable as the next guy — but not necessarily in a bad way.
The selling points of working for SB Nation fit in here, too. As a writer, you get to steer the conversation of the community you fell in love with. Not only that, you’re given a strong audience to showcase your work, a good way to gain a solid footing in the crowded world of sports blogging.
This was particularly big for me, since I really had no idea what direction I wanted to go in terms of the next step in my education. The extremely positive response I received from my first couple of posts on BFTB influenced me a great deal, though, pushing me towards some form of journalism before I eventually settled on a track that strives to combine business and media.
For that, I’m grateful for the opportunity SB Nation presented me with.
Look, a lot of positives and negatives exist on both sides of this debate. There’s a moral gray area that’s anything but clear and distinct.
However, my main qualms, the true animosities I’ve gleaned towards Vox Media, stem from two points in the Deadspin article.
The first revolves around a conference call Wagner held with two executives at the company. And boy, was that conversation enlightening. To quote SB Nation general manager Kevin Lockland:
“…we have people who contribute, you know, the sites also have a lot of user-generated content, things like that. We give site managers a lot of autonomy to create the site and the content that they feel is best for that audience for that fan base…any time that the league managers work with site managers, look, if they feel like there’s a need for additional contributors, we pay them. If a site manager brings someone on because they want to contribute and they’re not getting paid…that’s definitely not our policy. Not saying it hasn’t happened, though.”
As Wagner rightly pointed out, this assertion that site managers follow some central code that details how to pay every single contributor is just absurd. She writes, “The idea, in general, seems to be that the team sites are essentially grassroots operations and that the people who run them as glorified hobbyists being given shining opportunities that they should be grateful for.”
From my personal experience, I became a writer for BFTB with quite explicit guidelines. I was not going to receive any form of monetary compensation, a point I agreed to before signing up.
For Lockland and SB Nation’s editor-in-chief Elena Bergeron to flat-out lie about something I know to be untrue is grossly negligent. Not only that, to have the audacity to shift the blame to managers — many who would love to pay their staff — is outright disgusting.
Now, I have no idea if the pair is raking in a major piece of the billion-dollar Vox Media pie. They could just be scapegoats, taking their orders from the shadowy, behind-the-scenes executives who truly scrape the profits off the top. But for someone expected to contribute on a consistent basis strictly to appease my “fandom”, this one felt like a sucker punch to the stomach.
The second point that really hit me was all about the site I grew to detest. Wagner quoted longtime SB Nation mainstay Brad Wells, who would go on to leave the company in 2014:
“They would say, ‘We don’t want to be like Bleacher Report.’ They would say it in phone conversations and in email conversations. They’d say, ‘We’re not interested in slide shows and polls and things like that. Bleacher Report is about SEO crap, we’re supposed to be humor and tone and the place people want to go, not the place they accidentally click on.’ And then I felt like we weren’t going in that direction.”
That feeling of innocence and amateurism SB Nation once wore like a badge of honor has started to fade. Every single article sports a multitude of ads that renders articles borderline unreadable. In addition, the amount of sponsored content has been upped immensely, with writers forced to reach heavily in creating such crap. This, of course, coincides with Vox’s trajectory under the previously mentioned Jim Bankoff.
I understand this angle from a 21st Century business perspective. I really do. Nowadays, people of all ages won’t look twice before swiping each other’s Pro Football Focus account, or sharing access to streaming services such as Netflix and HBO Go.
A prime example is Bill Simmons’ The Ringer, which used to be hosted on the same platform as Unplugged, Medium. Simmons carried a large and talented cast of media types, and former Twitter CEO and founder of Medium Evan Williams has stuck to his mantra to stay away from native advertising. Williams instead preferred to try out subscription-based services, in which readers could choose which writers on Medium to fund. The results have been anything from positive, and The Sports Guy chose to move shop to none other than Vox Media.
The problem with SB Nation is that it’s a collection of 300+ unique blogs that aren’t really unified under a singular vision like The Ringer. Therefore, there’s no reason to believe that heavy advertising and good content can live in unison. And while the main site may attempt to keep its laid-back, counterculture edge on the market with nontraditional personalities such as Matt Ufford, I don’t think they’re really fooling anybody.
Many people I know with similar sports addictions hold SB Nation up to the same regard I once did, leading some of them to pursue gigs with one or more team sites. One friend even started writing for FanSided’s blog about the Mets in hopes of landing with the SB Nation equivalent in the future.
I’d like to say I congratulated them with absolute enthusiasm, but I didn’t. I couldn’t, when the reality of them actively contributing to their respective blogs is slim to none. After all, they’re just numbers, figures on a chart in some Vox Media cubicle.
I still adore that place I discovered four years ago, the site dedicated to powder-blue-and-gold faithful like myself. Though not as fervently as I once did, I still check the blog and comment alongside the rest of my fellow Chargers fans. But the allure SB Nation once held in my teenage mind has certainly waned of late, even more so since Wagner dropped her piece.
I’ll write a longform article for them here and there, but when a lukewarm response — the equivalent of a pat on the back — is all you get, the desire to work my ass off dissipates like a cloud of smoke. Sparking a healthy debate is always welcomed, sure, but rush a poorly-thought-out article and you run the risk of getting berated in the comment section by people who, for the most part, don’t realize that that person they’re ragging on isn’t getting paid.
Don’t worry — I’m not looking to end on such a dour note. As I said before, SB Nation opened a whole lot of doors, operating as a great resume-builder while lending a superb look into the media world. I’ve even formed connections with people not only across the nation but all over the world, a vital facet of the industry I one day hope to partake in. Plus, without my experiences at BFTB, I would have never had the confidence in my ability to start the very blog you’re viewing today.
To conclude, Laura Wagner — someone who (again, I have a hunch) has never written for SB Nation — compared Vox to the NCAA, another billion-dollar organization built off the backs of an unpaid labor force that sees slim-to-none of the profits. The comparison holds some merit on face value, sure, but there’s one stark contrast: unlike college athletes who risk losing their scholarships, I can walk away from SB Nation whenever I want, free of charge or consequence.
Not that I’ll stop writing for Bolts From The Blue any time soon. ’Cause goddammit, I sure as hell love that awesome, invigorating community, a phenomenon unparalleled everywhere else on the Internet.
You can find my past work for SB Nation here, assuming I’m not forcibly removed from the site and all traces of said work isn’t erased after this article publishes.
