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Collaborate with your community to build a sports reporting program.

Create and maintain sports coverage by partnering with interested community members.

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Why Sports?

High school sports are a community institution with a passionate built-in audience. Sports stories are often the best performing articles on local news sites and represents a great revenue generating opportunity. Local businesses love to sponsor sports coverage.

The problem is that many newsrooms no longer have the expertise or the resources to properly cover sports. At the beginning of the pandemic, sports stopped and many local sports reporters retired.

A technical solution

Mainstream efforts to fill this gap have focused largely on technical solutions, such as AI. This shouldn’t be surprising as the AP has successfully incorporated AI into its sports and quarterly earning coverage for almost a decade and there are many other examples.

A community-based alternative

While automated summaries are in themselves not inherently a bad idea, they miss the opportunity to more deeply engage with our communities. Instead, we have built a system that makes it easy for newsrooms to partner with interested community members to report back the results of games.

This system has the added bonus of creating a highly engaged community audience which is vital to the sustainability of small local outlets.

How it works

  1. Recruit community contributors
  2. Input their data along with the school and teams they will be reporting on in AirTable
  3. Import schedules into AirTable
  4. On game day, the teams contact will be texted a link to a form in which they can upload scores, media and descriptions.
    • This form can be connected to AirTable or it can be connected to your CMS.
      • If we connect it to AirTable, we can generate social-media scorecards to be used as the main art for a post. This will necessitate that we use one more tool called Zapier to push the data into a post on your CMS.
      • If the form is connected directly to your CMS it will create a draft post. We can skip using Zapier but the tradeoff is that we would not be able to generate the scorecard image.
  5. Once the draft is created we can then do a quick fact check, publish and push to social media.
  6. Rinse and repeat

The Playbook

Setting up the tools