A shame, I enjoyed reading the articles on their site.
BPL: Taking stock - and a pre-season break
Charles Happell
Written on Thursday, 06 February 2014 13:23
Yes, BPL is taking a break, a hiatus, a pre-season camp of sorts, while we take stock and examine not just our navels but our future.
It'll be a period where we sit in a circle, wear daisy chins, hold hands, hum a bit, chant and try to hit on the Universal Truths and Untold Secrets of website publishing, specifically how to make them a viable commercial concern.
As Ashley Browne has mentioned in these pages, running BPL over the past four years has been a hugely rewarding and challenging experience, where we've had to quickly learn about the craft of online publishing, the dark arts of Search Engine Optimisation and CPM, the science of Google Analytics and the business of, well, running a business.
It's been a hell of a journey, maddening and satisfying, demanding and gratifying - often all in the one day.
We've published high-end journalism from the likes of Tim Lane, Malcolm Knox and Greg Truman, and we've given dozens of would-be writers - university students, journalism graduates, bloggers, regular sports fans - a chance at having their views published on a credible site.
Any opinion piece that was well-considered, well-argued and well-written was given a guernsey: whether it be about greyhound racing or Canadian ice hockey.
Some of them set off firestorms in a way we could never have imagined.
When we published a Geoff Harris column about Sebastian Vettel's increasingly bitter rivalry with Mark Webber, it was picked up by a European Formula 1 site and our traffic went absolutely gangbusters. When Ken Piesse interviewed Muttiah Muralidharan and wrote that Murali did not rank any Australians in his list of top 10 batsmen, it was picked up by Cricinfo ... and the surge of hits from India and Sri Lanka brought the site crashing down for 12 hours.
Jordan Bannister wrote a heart-wrenching piece about the difficulty of umpiring an AFL match only days after his brother had become a quadraplegic in a horse-riding accident. His account attracted tens of thousands of readers, and hundreds of responses.
Twelve days ago, I ventured an opinion about Rafael Nadal's performance in the Australian Open final which is still attracting impassioned responses today. Some have called me an ignorant imbecile, and worse, for claiming that Rafa's gamesmanship is tarnishing his legacy, while the majority of commenters have (perhaps surprisingly) agreed with that contention and called out the world No.1 for his time-wasting, MTOs and on-court coaching.
As if we didn't already know, sport stirs the passions in extreme ways.
There were some subjects that you just knew - even before you hit the Publish button - would get the dial jumping: Collingwood FC, the behaviour of soccer crowds, the behaviour of the Australian cricket team, the NRL v AFL popularity debate, Harry Kewell, Eddie McGuire, Wayne Carey, Sachin Tendulkar, any criticism of any Indian cricketer and Brian Taylor's TV commentary.
And publishing any partisan column during an NRL State of Origin series was, well, not much different to unpinning a grenade and tossing it over the parapet.
Thanks to those who've been critical to the success of BPL since March 2010, especially Ashley Browne, Jonathan Howcroft, Ed Wyatt and Nick Tedeschi, and our major financial backers since day one. We couldn't have got this far without our crack team of Citizen Journalists and, of course, you - our loyal readers and Twitter followers.
So we'll be in limbo for the time being. Please excuse us while we take this pre-season break. Hopefully, we can return from our high-altitude camp, fitter and stronger than ever, ready to bust through that BPL banner.
http://www.backpagelead.com.au/index.php/afl/12131-bpl-taking-stock-and-a-pre-season-break?
