Bleacher Report, staffed largely by “unpaid sports fanatics,” was acquired for a reported $180 million in August by Turner Broadcasting. This is how it became one of the nation’s most popular sports-news sites:
Perhaps uniquely among journalistic entities, Bleacher Report has a “blanket policy” forbidding its writers from seeking out and breaking news. … Bleacher Report is designed to engage in the far more lucrative practice of pouncing on news broken by others, deploying its legions of writers to craft articles — or better yet, multi-page slideshows — linking to its own voluminous archives, and supplanting original stories on the Google rankings. Breaking a story is no longer valuable: owning it is.
