The sadness of Internet credibility

Back on the blog after a month away ... sorry. 

I return to this forum for numerous reasons but as usual, it's again to get something off my chest. There's been something bothering me for the last year for sure and maybe a little longer.

It boils down to this: People will read anything on the internet.

The worst offender of this in the sports spectrum is the craptastic website called Bleacher Report. You might know them as the website with all the slideshows and the site that will have endless stories about the same subject just to fill the Google results to attract page clicks. It's garbage. Sometimes I'll go trolling on Twitter to look up people that are getting mentioned by others. If they are listed as a "Featured writer/columnist" on Bleacher Report, that's my cue to leave. When I see people reading this stuff on their computer or sharing it online, I want to shame those people publicly.

There's a lot of hard-working bloggers out there that do a pretty damn good job of writing and following a sport or team. But at the beginning of the Internet age, many of them were dismissed as being "people in their parent's basement." Bleacher Report deserves that kind of treatment from the public. There is no credibility and there's no effort to gain it either. But Turner Sports bought Bleacher Report for $200 million last year, proof that their saturation paid off some.

Bleacher Report is hardly the only group doing crap writing on the Internet but the epidemic localized recently when a former SDSU football player wrote a blog post, explaining why he thought SDSU was the most underrated Division I school in the country. This was on something called "The Dirty Mint," which doesn't exactly scream credibility and furthermore, he didn't mention that he was an alum until the final sentence of the piece. Even if you're one who puts stock in the number of followers someone has (I don't) you should be cautious, especially when 99 percent of them are fake. bunch of fake, spam accounts.) I advise against giving him the clicks, so I won't link the piece. Grammar and capitalization -- surely points of emphasis in the English department at said university -- were basically non-existent.

(The above screencap taken June 5 had him listed for 79,000+ followers. He's lost 15 percent of those since then and a quick look at the followers show a bunch of fakes.)

I will, however, excerpt this part. Pick it apart as you please.

Ill give you a hint. This schools abbreviation is SDSU. If you just guessed San Diego State sorry you are wrong. Although I must say San Diego State is doing very well in sports all around as well. The most underrated Division 1 college in the nation is the South Dakota State Jackrabbits.

Not good. The writer has done the same thing with Minnesota State-Mankato after they had a good year at Division II. Why? Probably because it gets people to his blog, which he touted had a lot of hits following the post.

This type of lowest-common denominator type of writing bugs me not because it is bad (obviously, it is) but because most people will read it and share it on social media, not caring at all if it was good or worth a damn. There's no credibility here and readers don't appear to care.

It also bugs me because as a young journalist, I'm taking the time to build some credibility at least with other news outlets in the state. Stuff like this undermines that objective but it gives me confidence that news outlets will never really go away. Someone has to separate facts from crap, if you will.

Do me a favor and read for credibility. Thanks. Take care of yourselves ... and each other.