BLEACHERS BREW EST. MAY 2006

Someone asked me how my blog and newspaper column came to be titled "Bleachers Brew". It's like this, it's an amalgam of sorts of two things: The bleachers area in the stadium/arena where I used to sit when I would watch baseball, football, and basketball games and Miles Davis' great jazz album Bitches Brew. That's how it got culled together. I originally planned on calling it "The View from the Big Chair" that is a nod to Tears For Fear's second album, Songs from the Big Chair. So there.

Saturday, January 1, 2011

Bleachers' Brew through the years

The statistics of Bleachers’ Brew for December 2010 are as follows:

56,155 hits, 79,518 pageviews, 22,641 unique visitors with an average of 8:09 on the site.

Was December 2010 the highest? Nope. That honor belongs to September 2009 as Ateneo was going for a back-to-back. The single most number of hits in a day was over 8,000 and that was an Ateneo Blue Eagles preview before this Season 73 of the UAAP.

For the entire 2010, the stats are: 421,638 hits, 529,444 page views, 132,637 unique visitors from 169 countries. Average time on site 8:03.

The top stories of 2010 in Brew:

The numbers for Brew have gone up every year. Since the blog was put up in 2006, it has been a syndication for most of my materials that I produce for Business Mirror, ateneo.edu, Philippines Free Press, Maxim, Tower Sports NBA, Maxim, FHM etc. It is only the stuff in Rebound, the South China Morning Post, and Real Madrid FC that has not been posted because of contractual concerns or previous agreements.

We began keeping track of the stats only in mid-2007 so there are lost numbers. But the readership has grown exponentially every year.

I have oft received emails from sources where some materials are pasted on to their email because of firewalls or inaccessibility (whatever the hell that means) and that doesn’t register in the numbers.

The blog has been amazing and immensely gratifying. At first, I didn’t even believe in it but someone else insisted on it. Someone has better sense than me, right? The material that comes out here has been a source of information not just for your everyday sports fan but also other agencies and offices that I’d rather not mention. I don’t want to toot my vuvuzela on this. Suffice to say that I’ve received letters from people I never expected to hear from in my lifetime. I’ve received letters/email (and lots of FedExed materials from documents to DVDs/CDs to shoes) from almost every corner of the globe. And not just from Filipinos. That is reflected in Facebook's Brew entry where you'll see a multi-ethnic selection following. And many of them aren't even my friends on FB!

Brew began from being a hub of all my stories about the Ateneo Blue Eagles (I was writing about their games like an alumni version of the college newspaper The Guidon) and eventually my first columns in Business Mirror (the first was me trying to write like the other columnists as per the direction of the editor before me junking that for the way I wanted to write it). The first column for BM was so forgettable. By the second one, I wrote about the travails of a PBA referee, then Barry Bonds' "Dear God" letter, and then football. Obviously, what began as an Atenean audience has expanded. It's now gone beyond school affiliations to international borders. I receive letters from Tunisians (who want to know more about Philippine football and in turn I asked them about George Lucas filming Star Wars in their country), South Africans, Swiss, Serbs, Greeks, Vietnamese, and so much more. Even US State Department types. 

My designation in BM is “columnist” as my Bleachers’ Brew column 99.9% of the time comes out on a Monday (but there have been three occasions where I had two columns in a week). But I’ve since done more stuff like covering Smart Gilas; beat reporting for the UAAP and NCAA, and special features.

I’ve since branched out from sports writing (I began back in the early 1990s chipping in lots of feature writing for the Philippine Daily Inquirer) by doing music stories on bands, climate change features, political opinion and features, fitness and health, home improvement and home features, and travel.

More than writing, I also take photos and videos helping change the way reporting is done (as espoused by one of my gurus Kevin Sites).

I am excited for 2011 and what we can do.

Thank you so much for reading and all the support.

Cheers!

Rick


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