Bleacher Report...an on line magazine who's administrators once liked my off-the-beaten-path style of sports journalism. I wrote for them exclusively about Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). My articles averaged over a thousand reads each and averaged two Picks-Of-The-Day per.
Amazingly, and after penning only twenty-eight articles, I was ranked at number five among an MMA pool of around ninety writers. And many of these authors were established sportswriters, some of whom had published over a hundred pieces.
Then, one day out of the clear blue, the Bleacher Report administration and their sponsors decided to narrow their focus to sports journalists whose literary skills pretty much began and ended with penning routine MMA previews and recaps...stuff any hack writer can do. And without warning or explanation, Bleacher Report abruptly and unceremoniously bumped me from number five all the way down to number twenty-nine.
And there I lingered...in Purgatory, where no one would ever see my articles. Being featured on the front page was now a thing of the past. So, I decided to pull my articles off of Bleacher Report and add them to my blog. My feeling is, if Bleacher Report wants to feature previews and recaps instead of compelling and original in-depth MMA analysis, that's fine. They have a right to follow the money trend. Only, they'll do so without me.
So, soon MMA fans will get to read about the sport from a pure analyst's point of view...right here in my blog! I like to pen the various facets of MMA's big picture...I tend to think outside the box. Time sensitive previews and recaps I'm just not suited to write about. There's a million sports journalists out there who can cover the mundane tasks of dissecting yesterday's MMA matches or discuss who might win tomorrow's fights.
