Gannett papers using AI for high school football

Garbage in (as entered by a lazy coach/scorekeeper/statistician) equals garbage out

 

LOL! Thought I "knew" what I was clicking on when I did and was right! Had forgotten it was Johnny Upton, though.

 

Totally agree.
A major problem seems to be when the coach assigns a student manager the duties. In fairness to the kid, there's got to be peer pressure not to embarrass an athlete/friend/classmate who occupies the same dugout.

 

Or worse, a player's girlfriend.

 

Late chiming in here but we tried a version of this (different AI company) for Charlotte and Raleigh for 2021-22. I absolutely hated the idea at first, but we weren’t serving preps readers well outside of HS football and basketball coverage, so I decided to test it for the other sports. It also used ScoreStream as its data source, which meant only scores by quarter were entered and no player names; it was generating a “story” (only 1-2 sentences) based off only a line score. Garbage in, garbage out.

The real value of it was the final scores. North Carolina wasn’t a MaxPreps state, which meant there lacked a reliable destination for anyone looking to quickly check the score of area high school teams. I decided to take a shot on it. Every night we’d get an email that was pre formatted the way we asked for it:

Sport

Team 1 XX, Team 2 YY
<Two sentences about the game based off the line score.>

repeat

And 2-3 times each week we’d copy that text into a post template we created in the CMS with a disclaimer at the top that this was generated by AI and to ctrl+f and type your school name to quickly find the score you’re interested in. We would SEO it fairly well with a headline like “North Carolina high school sports scoreboard, (Date)” and hit publish.

We decided to put it behind the hard paywall (no sports coverage generates subscriptions as effectively as preps), and it worked well. Each post would generate 2-7 new subscriptions — three times a week. There ended up being a lot of value for readers in having it, even if that value was just the score. We were able to fill a gap in the market with the lack of MaxPreps coverage.

 

Local Gannett paper could have used some AI to get a Razorback gamer into Sunday’s edition. Instead, they ran a feature on the NHL offseason, a NASCAR preview and a TCU-Colorado gamer on the front. We are 55 miles from the Arkansas campus.

 

Early deadlines?

 

Arkansas had noon kick. Of course, the Times Record also has a noon deadline so the out-of-state design hub and editors can ship it before larger papers.

Currently, the only in-state employee is their Arkansas beat writer. So there is zero local coverage of the school board or city board of directors. Maybe AI could handle that?

 

You know what that is? That's some former Little League parent who thought putting the kids' full names out there would lead to trouble.

 

Or some lawyer-type telling the league that giving out the kids' first and last names could open them up to liability ... actually had a big youth soccer association give me that reasoning a few years back ...

 

I seem to remember the NCHSAA pushing MaxPreps on its membership in a big way back in the early 2010s (before you moved out of Coloradistan) ... did they back off of that?

 

I remember covering a high school basketball game and looking at the book to get the rosters. One team's list had only numbers -- not uniform numbers. The team came from a juvenile detention facility and the players could only be identified by their prison numbers. "Starting at center, No. 78436." I don't remember how I handled this in the story, probably just didn't mention anyone from that school since it was out of the area.