The worst types of stories that the MMA media loves to run
Ever wanted to know what's happening on Twitter but without actually opening Twitter? Man, does the MMA media ever have you covered.
It’s hard out here for MMA websites. That thing that websites did to newspapers? Social media has now done that to websites. How do you get people to come to your specific website and spend a fraction of their shortened attention spans reading (or at least clicking on) your specific stories, when Twitter and Instagram and Facebook offer an endless scroll of constant content without requiring users to commit any real time or mental energy into the act of consumption?
One solution is to use those same social media hubs – especially Facebook – to redirect internet traffic your way. But you know what happens then? You end up tailoring your content to what works on social media, which usually means that it gets a whole lot dumber, offering way more flash than substance.
I fell into this trap just this weekend. Idly scrolling Facebook, I saw an MMA-related headline that was too stupid (not to mention borderline dishonest) to ignore: “Fans mock UFC star for being choked out in debut after twerking onstage.” This one came from British tabloid The Mirror, so right off I should have known better. And, really, I guess I did. But I still clicked anyway. Because apparently I hate myself.
Since I’m all the way in the MMA bubble, I knew the “UFC star” the headline referred to was actually a mostly unknown fighter named Ailin Perez who fought in the curtain-jerker of UFC Paris on Saturday. How you can get away with calling her a UFC star in the same headline that later admits it was her debut fight is beyond me, but really, what this article wanted to do was shit all over her for shaking her ass at weigh-ins and then losing the actual fight. But rather than write an opinion piece that just does that and owns it, this article instead farmed out the job to random, unnamed Twitter users, aka the “fans” mentioned in the headline.
Seriously, all the article does is describe Perez’s dance and her ensuing submission loss to Stephanie Egger on the first fight of the prelims, and then it hands over commentary duties to randos on Twitter, who chime in with all the predictable quotes about how she should have worked more on choke escapes and less on twerking, etc. Again, it doesn’t even tell you who the Twitter users are! There’s not even an attempt to suggest that they are any sort of authorities on the subject. It’s ostensibly a news article, but the only news it is reporting is that unknown people are talking shit on the internet. Pure garbage, but the kind that works on Facebook.
This is an extreme example of the form, and one that’s not even from one of the usual MMA media outlets, but it did get me thinking. What are the worst types of stories that MMA websites have fallen into the habit of doing, purely for the sake of clicks? What genius attempts to siphon off an audience from Facebook have become mainstays in dumbing down the fight sports discourse? Because perhaps if we could categorize and name them, we might more easily recognize them as they appear.
In pursuit of that goal, I offer this list of bad MMA media story types that, while not at all exhaustive, should hopefully at least get us started.
We read Twitter so you don’t have to
The story from The Mirror is maybe the worst example of this type of story, but it’s definitely not the only kind. Other entries in this genre include ‘here’s what people on Twitter said about the most recent UFC fights’ and ‘here’s what two (or more) fighters said about each other on Twitter today.’ That’s not to say that Twitter can never be a worthy news source. But one problem, especially with the ‘fighters shit-talking each other on Twitter’ variety of story, is that you don’t necessarily know who actually wrote the tweet. It could easily be the fighter’s manager – and it often is. And since so few managers manage so many fighters, it’s totally possible that your story about two fighters beefing on Twitter is really just a story about one manager writing tweets back and forth to himself.
Fighter X “breaks his silence” or “issues a statement” – by posting on Instagram
Did you lose your fight this past Saturday night? Did you then put up an Instagram post apologizing to your fans, thanking your team, and vowing to come back stronger? Then congratulations, you have now broken your silence and/or issued a statement, according to the MMA media. It’s enough to make one wonder, how long after the loss do you have to wait for there to be a sufficiently breakable silence? If a fighter makes this post as soon as he gets back to the locker room, does it still count? What if the “silence” in question was just the five minutes it took him to walk out of the cage, find his flip flops, and then get to his phone? These are the questions that keep me up at night.
Any possible excuse for a photo gallery of hot fighters
No one loves this type of story more than my former colleagues at MMA Junkie. Visit the Junkie on any given day, check out the sidebar of “most popular” stories, and there’s a very good chance that at least one of the stories will be a photo gallery of some hot female fighter or ring girl. As I write this, the top TWO spots are occupied by two different posts centered around Tai Emery, the BKFC fighter who celebrated her win over the weekend by showing the crowd her tits. (Though, of course, the photos are censored. Because we want to show you the tits but are clearly far too classy to actually show you the tits. Obviously.)
The other way Junkie likes to do this is the old “Through the Years” photo gallery. As in, anything Miesha Tate or Paige VanZant does to get in the news, that’s excuse enough to republish the “Miesha Tate: Through the Years” photo gallery. It works every time, gets good traffic every time, and the photo gallery is already made and just sitting there, so why not? And so what if the title makes it seem like she died and we’re choosing to remember the bikini-est moments of her life? The shit gets clicks, and that’s the name of the game.
‘My fighter is good,’ says manager. ‘Other fighters less so.’
This type of story is the outlier on this list, because these typically aren’t for clicks. They aren’t even necessarily meant for anyone to read. They exist mostly to stroke some manager’s ego in the hope of future rewards of one kind of another. A sub-genre of this category is fighters or their managers laying out wildly ambitious plans that they may never intend to even attempt. Just know that if it involves a promise of jumping up one or more weight classes at some undetermined point in the future? Yeah, your Spidey sense should be tingling.
There is one tiny nub of actual news in this post, so little that we could tell it to you in the headline, but we won’t
The way it used to work in newspapers, where actual physical space measured in column inches was a concern, was you’d try to get as much pertinent information as you could into as small a space as possible. Now that we measure by the click, it’s the opposite. The goal is to spread the information into as many different clickable stories as possible.
But what do you do if the entire story is just one tiny bit of information, such as who received a bonus award, or which commentators/refs will be present for which fights, or which fight was the toughest of GSP’s career? That information could fit in the headline, but if you do that, who’ll read the story? Especially since they know from experience that the story will likely not provide much further information. Then what you do is use the headline to promise (but not reveal) the answer. The headline becomes a tool to tease rather than inform. The click is the price you pay for the information.
Here’s Dana White just saying stuff that we will offer zero critical analysis of
Press conference moments with the UFC President have long been clickable gold for MMA websites. Even though his willingness to sit through these is far more unpredictable now (didn’t show up for the presser after UFC Paris, for example, because fuck it), he still covers a range of topics that can be broken down for use in tons of individual stories, plus there’s a chance he’ll just go off and say some wild-ass shit that people will click on.
But perhaps no one in MMA is given so much leeway to just say stuff without any real pushback from the media. Remember when White’s whole thing was big talk about the UFC’s anti-piracy efforts? He had people outside the illegal streamers’ homes, people listening to their phone calls, just waiting for them to flip the switch on that pirated pay-per-view and spring the trap. Every time he said this, MMA websites would run it. But was any of it actually true? Did it have any basis in fact? Not many people really seemed that interested in even trying to find out. (I tried, for the record, and even other UFC execs admitted that yeah, that tough talk was mostly just Dana bullshitting.) These were just good, easy White quotes that made for quick, clickable stories.
It’s a similar deal when White goes off on “the media,” either in general or by singling out specific targets. Remember a couple weeks ago when White got mad about a story by ESPN’s Marc Raimondi, who he called a “scumbag” for essentially just repeating the quotes White had given to GQ? White claimed not to know who wrote the story, claimed he hadn’t even read the story, but he fed his outrage to Yahoo’s Kevin Iole, who in turn fed it to the rest of us, which in turn made for another round of stories about White being mad at some media coverage. And rarely does any of that coverage even attempt to offer any critical analysis about whether or not any of this outrage is justified. He could get up there and claim the MMA media is all just space aliens wearing human skin, and the websites would run it without even bothering to point out that, actually, they are humans.
It’s just White + anger = clicks. A formula that never lets you down. And the best part? That well of anger never runs dry.