Blog Spotlight: Aaron Gleeman

Aaron Gleeman is a 21st Century success story. Like many boys, he grew up immersed in sports and decided at an early age to pursue a life in athletics. But Aaron's youthful dreams and his adult reality turned out different from most of the rest of those wide-eyed boys. Read on to see my e-mail exchange with one of the country's most successful bloggers. Find out how he turned rejection into a career to which others now aspire.

Can you give me a brief outline of how you became a sports fan and what prompted you to start writing about sports.

Sports has always been my biggest passion, from playing little league and collecting baseball cards to watching every game I could on television and obsessing over newspaper and magazine articles. Because of that, I've wanted to "write about sports" for a living since I was a little kid. It's an odd job for a 10-year-old to want, but I never really considered doing anything else with my life.

Can you describe which writing gigs you've had and how one job may have influenced you in the next, either from a point of view of that it led directly to another gig (someone saw my work at X and offered me a chance at Y) or I learned X at one place and it helped me to get Y.

I wrote for my junior-high newspaper and then was the sports editor for my high-school newspaper. I went to the University of Minnesota in large part because it's my hometown school, but also because it has both an excellent journalism program and the largest entirely student-run newspaper in the country.

During my freshman year I tried several times to land a position on the student newspaper, the Minnesota Daily. I applied for various staff-writing positions and internships, and had a couple interviews, but was ultimately turned down each time. So that summer, in my quest to find some sort of outlet for my writing, I started up a blog. That was in August of 2002 and it's been going non-stop since then.

After the blog readership began to grow a bit, I started writing occasionally for a site called Baseball Primer that has since changed its name to Baseball Think Factory. In March of 2004 I co-created a site called The Hardball Times, which features a staff of baseball columnists as well as an in-depth stats section and various other cool stuff for baseball fans. The Hardball Times has published two books, with a third coming out in November. Our publisher is ACTA Sports, which is the company that does "The Bill James Handbook" and "The Fielding Bible" along with some other titles.

A few years ago I was contacted by RotoWorld to do some work for their fantasy baseball magazine, and after doing that I gradually began writing regularly for their website. I became a full-time staff member in March of this year and am officially a Senior Baseball Editor, although I also do quite a bit of football writing. RotoWorld was recently purchased by NBC and so now I'm an employee of NBC/General Electric.

Through RotoWorld, my columns have been syndicated to FoxSports.com, USAToday.com, and a few other mainstream sites. I also do the occasional freelance magazine article. And last but not least, I was featured in Sports Illustrated earlier this year in an article about the changing face of online sports writing. They even did a photoshoot at my house and my ugly mug appeared alongside Bill Simmons of ESPN.com.

How many hours a day do you spend in front of a computer?

Basically all of them. I work from home and work via the computer, so if I'm home and not sleeping, I'm usually online or at the very least typing.

Besides producing top notch writing, what were the keys to your blog becoming so successful?

I think the biggest key to gaining a wide audience is simply writing every day. People want to know that there'll be something for them to read if they show up and building that trust is important if you want someone to make your blog a daily stop.

It's also important to produce good content, obviously, but in my case I think timing was just as important. When my blog began in 2002, there were only a handful of popular baseball blogs. That allowed me to quickly gain a niche. Had it launched in 2006 instead, there would be hundreds of similar sites to compete with to establish an audience and it might be tough regardless of the content.

If you have a story idea, do you research it thoroughly to see if and how it's been covered before or do you not want to be influenced by other writers?

I try not to cover material that's been beaten to death already, but for the most part if I think I can add something to a topic, I'll write about it. My free time for reading other sites has sadly vanished a bit as I've becoming busier with own writing, but I still make the rounds to catch up on my favorites a few times per week.

What sites do you consider must reads?

The general baseball sites I go to each day are RotoWorld, Hardball Times, ESPN.com, Baseball Think Factory, and Baseball Prospectus. For Twins blogs, my favorites are Batgirl, Stick and Ball Guy, and Will Young. And, of course, Deadspin is worth stopping at several times a day.

(All of those links are available on the sidebar of my blog).

What are the strengths and weaknesses of blogs versus mainstream media (MSM)?

The strengths of blogs versus mainstream media are the immediacy, the free reign, and the sense of community. If I have something to say to the audience, I can have it posted within seconds. Similarly, I can say whatever I want without having to go through an editor first, which allows me to have both freedom with topics and show far more personality than most newspaper or magazine writers.

Along with showing your personality, you can build a better relationship with your readers because you are far accessible to them. Whether that's through answering e-mails, telling personal stories on the blog, or interacting with people in a comments section, it all leads to people being invested in your writing and your blog.

Now, the flip side is that not having anyone to edit what you're doing can be dangerous, as well as simply make your writing less readable. Bloggers also are at a disadvantage when it comes to access, resources, and things like that. For the most part we're on our own, for better or worse.

Are there ethics battles between blogs and MSM? If not, what should be the code of conduct between the entities?

Whenever a new thing is introduced and becomes popular, the people heavily invested in the old thing will naturally get defensive. That's why you see old-school print media guys reacting so negatively to the mere idea of blogs, although that has certainly lessened over the years. Similarly, the people invested in the new thing will naturally try to bring down the old thing, which is why you see bloggers often taking mainstream media to task.

However, once you take a step back from all the silliness, you can see that it's all pretty much the same thing. You're a reporter whether you're digging up stories for the New York Times or a personal blog. You're a columnist whether you're offering your opinions in the Washington Post or a blog about the Twins. The sooner people realize that on both sides of the fence, the quicker we can get rid of all the pettiness.

What does the future hold for blogs and how do you see the relationship evolving between blogs and MSM?

I think the line between "blog" and other forms of media is becoming pretty blurry at this point. In that sense I see a lot less "battle" between bloggers and mainstream media than a lot of people seem to want to play up. Half the newspapers in the country now host blogs, many mainstream reporters and writers are blogging, and many blogs get more traffic than mainstream sites and newspapers. Aside from being tagged with the "blog" label, the differences are quickly going away.

With ESPN, we've seen a platform for print journalists to make the leap to TV analysis, with the Washington Post's Tony Kornheiser on Monday Night Football and all of the talking heads on Around the Horn and similar shows. Will there be a directly comparable or somewhat similar platform for bloggers in the future? Is this even desirable from your point of view?

Sure. I think as bloggers blend more and more into the mainstream media, they'll get plenty of chances for radio and TV opportunities. I get asked to appear on radio shows several times per month and usually decline, just because it's sort of out of my element, but in the future I'll be doing more non-writing stuff like that. If you're a good and/or popular writer and able to speak relatively well, it only makes sense that you'd take a shot at other mediums.

Aaron, 24, has accomplished a tremendous amount in his professional career in a very short time. By embracing blogs early on he made the rest of the world come to him and he is living proof that talent wins out in the end. The University of Minnesota's loss has turned into the gain of sports fans throughout the country. It will be a great day when self-important hacks like Skip Bayless and Jay Mariotti disappear from both the airwaves and print circles and are replaced by insightful contributors like Aaron Gleeman.