Holy balls that's a freaking memoir.
I know exactly what he's talking about. I had the same thing happen to me and others I worked with. I started writing for Sportstalk.com back in 2000. It was a site started by Chad Ford and Jason Peery, two guys who went to BYU together. Ford was a lawyer and Peery was/is a realestate mogul in Palo Alto. The internet was booming and Jason was waiting for the right opportunity to sell the site and keep everyone on staff. He had big aspirations, and it was looking really good for everyone who had busted their ass to make the site what it was. Unfortunately there was a huge internet crash in 2001, Peery couldn't afford to keep the site going on his own dime, and ESPN wanted Chad so they basically took sportstalk off his hands and only employed a handful of people.
When I started working for ESPN I was making less than minimum wage as a private contractor. ESPN Insider started out with a bunch of writers from sportstalk, but eventually they were all weeded out until only a few of us remained. We were basically just data entry doing a job that a computer could probably do quicker and more efficiently. The site was generating a ton of revenue for ESPN, but they didn't want to pay us a fair wage. I stayed on with ESPN for five years, and I eventually got a better hourly wage, but I finally got fed up when the managing editor of ESPN online told me, flat out, that they didn't want to publish some guy writing from his basement. He wasn't just talking about me, he was talking about my entire breed of writer.
Internet journalism is more widely accepted now. It was a real up-hill battle when I got into it. Even now, there's still this stupid prejudice against anyone who didn't go to school for journalism. I'm not afraid to admit that I hate the smug attitude that some print journalists have/had, and I take pleasure in watching newspapers fold so these archaic bastards are forced to strike out and embrace the online platform. Writing is about talent. It's always been about talent. Not everyone can write, so going to school to be a journalist always seemed like a waste of time. If you're good at it, go do it. There's a reason why Hollywood favors talent over education. Sure, classes can teach you to improve your writing, but the raw talent needs to be there.
You know what really sucks about reading that article? I came up with an idea similar to bleacher report after sportstalk died back in 2001. I wanted to create a site that would give young writers an opportunity to work in a professional setting and show their stuff. I wanted to target college writers. I approached a few of the guys from sportstalk who didn't find work with ESPN, but I didn't have the coding ability and this was back when you had to know HTML, so I let it go. It stings a bit to read that the douche who created Bleacher Report sold it for $127 million.
