"Artificial Intelligence" Is Coming for Sportswriting
The automation of content won't stop at aggregation. We'll inevitably see our favorite sports written about by large language models — and it won't be pretty. Or good for fans.
After I was let go by my previous employer, I began pitching stories about “Artificial Intelligence” and its ability to replace most facets of modern sportswriting. It might have been clear that my anxiety was coming through.
Those pitches didn’t end up going anywhere and since then, we’ve already seen the first examples of AI-driven sportswriting popping up in genuine newspapers.
This piece of content is so far removed from sportswriting that it fails to even operate as a cheap parody of the product.
It’s hilariously bad — repeated information in the first two paragraphs, incredibly awkward phrasing in the second sentence (“edged in a close encounter of the athletic kind”) and so on. And it’s not the worst example of an “AI”-generated article about a high school football game played last weekend.
Having two lede paragraphs is cartoonishly awful writing. It seems as if one of the paragraphs is likely meant to be part of the dek — the subhead meant to summarize the article instead of part of the body of the text.
But the text didn’t mention a single player and included the inscrutable sentence “the Warriors chalked up this decision in spite of the Warhawks’ spirited fourth-quarter performance.” It did not delve into any context surrounding the game — whether these schools are rivals, have a history, have player or coach overlaps, whether either school has legitimate playoff aspirations and so on.
Ohio is one of the most football-mad states in the country, but this coverage of the high school game doesn’t even tell us what division these teams are in, whether this game has conference or division implications, whether either team had worries about holes left by graduating seniors and more. And that doesn’t even touch the possible college recruiting angles.
Westerville Central has had a history of talent, and two NFL players — Nick Vannett and Benny Snell — played football there in high school. Westerville North has a four-star recruit in edge defender Brian Robinson, currently being courted by Kentucky, Michigan and Penn State.
Defensive tackle Demetrius John was a three-star recruit from Westerville North who committed to the University of Illinois, but he transferred to Dublin Coffman High School; that transfer could impact Westerville North’s defensive line. The Warriors may also have 2025 recruits in offensive lineman Jake Cook and athlete Jonathan Stevens.
All of these are stories that took me some amount of time and effort to uncover but would be information that would be instantaneously accessible to anyone used to covering local high school football in Ohio.
The refusal to have an editor even look over the most obvious mistakes or missing contextual information is itself telling. This is aggressive cost-cutting behavior. And it shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Gannett Is the Present and Future of Modern Journalism
Anyone following the industry could probably have predicted that this would come from a Gannett-owned newspaper. Gannett is the largest U.S. newspaper publisher and has been buying up local newspapers across the country to integrate into its larger USA Today network.
In 2019, New Media Investment Group, managed by private equity firm Fortress Investment Group, acquired Gannett. This forced a merger between Gannett and another media-holding property underneath the Fortress Investment Group, Gatehouse Media.
They told press at the time that they would target “inefficiencies” as a method of cutting costs but that the savings would largely not “come from editorial,” meaning that the journalists and their editors should be safe. They added that their mission “is to connect, protect and celebrate local communities” and that “the core of that is great local journalism.”
As the New York Times pointed out, this is a common refrain from newspaper executives before engaging in aggressive cuts. Gannett had already made those kinds of cuts before the acquisition, laying off 100 newsroom employees earlier that year — already a measure often meant to make a company more appealing for an acquisition.
After Gannett was bought out, they laid off at least 100 more employees — likely more — and then bought out 500 more a few months later.
Every year, COVID-impacted or otherwise, has seen Gannett lay off more employees, with at least 600 laid off in 2022. Not included in those layoff numbers are the dozens of local newspapers that Gannett has shut down or moved entirely to digital. All in all, Gannett/Gatehouse has cut down from 25,000 employees since the acquisition to 11,000.
While they had been posting losses for most of those years (not all of them), they just turned in their second consecutive quarter of profit. Employees have yet to see the gains from those profits, and often have subsidized them with hundreds of hours of unpaid labor.
That might be why journalists across Gannett have gone on strike, arguing that Gannett’s cost-cutting measures have hurt the product and have sent Gannett in a negative feedback loop, where poor quality creates losses and losses create cuts, which hurt the quality.
Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard agrees.
The Gannett that we have now is the result of the merger of two very large companies. The idea was [that] an individual newspaper might struggle on its own, but if you buy enough of them, you can extract as much of the cost of producing the newspaper from the local community as possible. You cut down on print days. You have the page layout and editing done elsewhere. The thought was you could achieve these economies of scale and make a profitable business. The problem is, as part of the merger, Gannett took on a lot of debt, and they have to pay off that debt. So they need revenue. And the way that they have been doing that is by cutting costs to the bone. That means cutting staff and cutting the quality of their newspapers.
Despite the two recent quarters of profits, this viewpoint had been shared by most of the market since the acquisition. Gannett has seen its stock prices largely plummet relative to the rest of the industry.
The shuttering of local papers has resulted in “news deserts,” where small communities are left with no local news sources. As Benton put it:
I see a lot more uncovered city council meetings. I see a lot more corruption that doesn't get noticed. I see a lot more uninformed voters, more people who take their cues for how they view their government from national media and the politicized world there as opposed to their local government.
It follows that a Gannett-owned publication would then delve into “AI.” They won’t be the only ones.
Sports Illustrated Is the Present and Future of Sportswriting
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Wide Left to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.