July 12, 2023

Re: Sports Journalism, AI, and the Future of Reading and Writing

My wife likes to tell a story about me—one that dates back to our high-school years. As she recalls, a number of us were once sitting around before school, and the subject of summer reading came up. At some point in the conversation, I reported with a teenage smirk: “I’ve never read a book in my entire life.”

Now, to this day, I question the veracity of this tale, now matter how often it’s told at dinner parties. My counterargument has been that, if I did make this claim, it was merely to needle people such as my future wife, who was a straight-A student and ended up going to Vanderbilt. Besides, in the bigger scheme of things, my (alleged) comment was not true. In actual fact, I read voraciously in middle school and in high school, though my interests were decidedly limited. In a nutshell, I tended to read books and articles about sports. For instance, a subscription to Sports Illustrated was an annual Christmas tradition in my house, and each week I looked forward to receiving a new issue. In those days, there were some excellent writers at Sports Illustrated—Frank Deford (1938-2017), Peter Gammons (1945-), Ralph Wiley (1952-2004), and Rick Reilly (1958-), among others. I also had a penchant for sports books, including classics such as Roger Angell’s The Summer Game (1972) and John Feinstein’s A Season on the Brink (1986), along with minor works such as Pete Rose on Hitting (1985) and Say Hey: The Autobiography of Willie Mays (1988). Clearly I had an affinity for prose on baseball, but, in general, I was happy to read in a variety of areas, from Alabama football to Wimbledon.

Now, in perusing this kind of literature, it never really occurred to me that I was “reading.” Since these authors and/or topics were not assigned in school, studying them never felt obligatory or rote. And yet, there is no question that they prepared me to succeed as a student. To highlight one example, Feinstein’s portrayal of notorious college basketball coach Bob Knight (1940-) in A Season on the Brink bears a notable resemblance to Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599): both works explore the nature of leadership, suggesting that socio-political power entails moral ambiguity. Just as importantly, however, the practice of reading sports literature accustomed me to spending quiet time in reflection, to seeing how language and syntax operate, and to appreciating the art of a good narrative.

Alas, over the last two decades, sports journalism has changed a great deal. In 2019, amid cuts and layoffs at Sports Illustrated, Dave Hannigan ruefully observed:

The internet [has] the industry in a vice grip, [and] SI was slow to embrace the new technology and a generation came of age for whom the tactile pleasure of fingering a glossy magazine remains largely an alien sensation.

While the new owners made fatuous noises about plans to save the brand by replacing long-serving staff with low-rent freelancers, the SI of popular imagination has actually been on life support for quite some time.

Haemorrhaging half a million subscribers in the last decade, the number of issues per year recently halved from 50 to 25, and the days when it was the national benchmark for sportswriting and photography (check out the collected works of Neil Leifer) long gone, one more victim of the rise of clickbait, the dwindling of attention spans and the harsh new economic reality.

And yet, at that time, there was still hope that traditional sports writing would persist—a hope buoyed by a relatively new sports website called The Athletic. Founded in January 2016, The Athletic quickly established itself as a potential successor to Sports Illustrated. First, The Athletic had a business model meant to survive the Internet era. Whereas a number of online sports outlets were trying to survive on ad revenue, The Athletic realized that this was a dead end. People were already reading fewer long-form articles, so “serious” journalism was no longer capable of garnering enough “clicks” to pay for itself. A subscription-based service was essential if good sports writing was to survive. In 2018, James Mirtle made this case in The Athletic, exuding palpable confidence in the process:

The Athletic is different. We are not ESPN or TSN, who can have auto-play video ads and push customers to their cable networks for major sources of revenue. We’re focused on fans who want high quality, in-depth coverage of their teams, content that isn’t designed to service advertisers or clicks. It’s designed solely to be informative and entertaining.

The Athletic would not happen on an ad revenue model. Trust me, I’ve looked into it. So far, we’ve seen that it can work through low-cost subscriptions. By all indications, we’ll be around for a long time.

Mirtle’s temerity was matched by The Athletic’s investment in many of the biggest names in sports journalism. Whether it was a Jayson Stark in baseball, a Stewart Mandel in college football, or a David Aldridge in pro basketball, The Athletic practically cornered the market on old-school sportswriting. If you were born between, say, 1966 and 1986 and you grew up loving Sports Illustrated, a subscription to The Athletic seemed almost like a portal to a bygone era. No more AI-composed articles on BuzzFeed, no more crass rants on sites such as Barstool Sports: on The Athletic you could read real writers, who were paid real money to do real reporting—and all for less than ten bucks per month.

Yet, even as The Athletic expanded to markets around North America, there were signs that trouble was brewing. Neither subscription revenue nor fundraising had met expectations. In January 2021, the company began exploring a buyout, but the process was fraught with difficulty. A June 2021 article in Forbes put it this way:

Earlier this year, Axios and The Athletic ended discussions about joining forces and forming a Special Purpose Acquisition Corporation (SPAC).  Merger talks between Vox and The Athletic also went nowhere, according to Axios.

 It isn’t clear why the media world isn’t interested in “buying” whatever The Athletic is “selling.”

At last, in January 2022, The New York Times Company acquired The Athletic for more than 500 million dollars—a hefty payday, for sure, but one that came at a cost. For the website’s mission of sustaining traditional sports writing would have to take a backseat to the larger vision of the Times.

As it turns out, the Times has found that The Athletic, as originally constituted, is ill-suited to the realities of the Internet Age. In June 2023, after losing nearly eight million dollars in the second quarter of 2023, the Times laid off 4% of The Athletic’s staff and reassigned numerous other employees in an effort to jumpstart its brand. In good corporate speak, these moves were officially termed a “reorganization,” allowing the company to focus on broader, more popular storylines and to eliminate the old-fashioned reporting that had been its hallmark. Indeed, should this endeavor prove successful, the Times has already promised to expand The Athletic’s staff in the future. As Times rep Jordan Cohen put it, “We will continue to invest in our editorial operation as we prioritize initiatives that help us achieve our strategy and expect The Athletic’s newsroom to be larger at the end of this year than it was last year.”

Yet, such claims seem as quixotic as The Athletic’s now defunct mission. Whether it’s Twitter, ESPN or The Los Angeles Times, cuts in newsrooms and media agencies have become standard over the last few years. What is startling about The Athletic, however, is its proverbial fall from grace. A media channel such as ESPN, which is owned by the massive Walt Disney Company, is expected to operate in a cutthroat manner. But The Athletic was supposed to be different. It was supposed to be a site where the written word is still valued, where scribes and wordsmiths wax poetic about the games we love. And even if that goal is not entirely dead, there can be no doubt that it is receding—a relic of the past, enduring in washed-out glory.

The headlines about The Athletic have tended to focus on financial side of the matter. It’s a business, after all. But I would argue that The Athletic’s rapid decline speaks to a number of broader, more philosophical issues. First, there is the question of the growing role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in sports writing in particular and news media in general. As one commentator has explained, “Newsrooms are increasingly experimenting with AI-powered automation to produce sports reports, financial updates and other data-based articles. News agencies, including AP, Reuters and AFP, produce thousands of automated articles a year.” Since sports can be understood in quantifiable terms—averages, percentages, records, and so on—technology companies such as United Robots are able take this information, collate it according to certain parameters, and generate AI reports: “The robot is trained to understand what data points to include in a story. With the correct data, it can produce reports from different angles using the same data points, such as a match report from the home team’s perspective or from the away team’s point of view.” This sort of writing is as efficient as it is convenient. With an emphasis on objective statistics, rather than on literary style, “minimal, if any, editing is now required before publication.” Newspapers can double both their “scale and coverage,” all while freeing (at least in theory) human journalists to do valuable work elsewhere.

In and of itself, robot-generated sports reporting may seem fairly trivial. Sure, old-school types might long for a glossy Sports Illustrated folded neatly in their mailbox, but it’s just sports, right? The main thing is to get the facts: who won and who lost, who played well and who didn’t. If you provide this information, and sprinkle in an occasional “human interest” story, isn’t that enough? The problem, however, is that the crisis affecting sports journalism is not a one-off. In truth, it is a bellwether, signaling a movement that is coming to permeate every aspect of society.

In March, I wrote a lengthy piece about the “end of the humanities” (see the embedded story above), noting that two recent trends in higher education stand in an inverse relationship to one another: the more universities embrace AI chatbots in the classroom, allowing students to use apps such as ChatGPT to do research, write papers, and so on, the less they’ll want to invest in resources in the humanities, including curricula, faculty, and libraries. Indeed, in the same way that no one remembers phone numbers anymore or that musical literacy is in decline, so will people increasingly “lose” the capacity to read and write—or, at least, to read and write well. After all, robots can do similar work in a fraction of the time and with but a scintilla of the energy.

One might argue that this is an overreaction, a “hot take.” Nevertheless, it is impossible to deny that the time-honored liberal arts curriculum is dying out. Already in November 2018, well before the economic implosion sparked by COVID-19, there was a marked decrease in the number of degrees earned in subjects such as English, History, and Philosophy. As one commentator then put it, someone trained in such fields appears destined to “end up as a barista.” But this may now be an antiquated metaphor. The stereotype of the Hegel-reading, Tarkovsky-watching barista working day shifts at Starbucks may no longer apply, simply because no one will be asked to read Hegel’s philosophy or to watch Tarkovsky’s films anymore. To be sure, universities are increasingly yielding to this trend and, in the process, exacerbating it. Marymount University recently cut nine liberal-arts majors, citing low student enrollment. Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota slashed eleven such majors in 2022. Several public institutions have made similar decisions, including the University of Alaska and the University of Akron. And this is to say nothing of the liberal-arts colleges that have simply closed over the last several years—a list that indicates how wide-ranging this problem is. Urbana University in Ohio has shut its doors, as has Judson College in Alabama, Becker College in Massachusetts, and Holy Names University in California. More are scheduled to follow:

“We think that there is going to be a catch-up of closures in 2023, and probably into 2024,” explained Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst for the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. “It’s hard to predict when it’s going to happen and which type of institutions that it will happen to, but we anticipate a catching-up period to account for the past two years for colleges that would have closed but didn’t.”

People often bemoan these shutdowns, noting that they adversely impact students, not to mention university employees. However, what tends to be missing from the discussion is that such closures, much like the decline of sports journalism, are symptoms of a rapidly metastasizing disease: our society no longer puts a premium on reading and writing. It is said in the Bible: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matt. 6:21). So it is here. Institutions are investing less in the liberal arts curriculum (“where your treasure is”) because people’s hearts just aren’t in it. This is especially true of young people. One recent headline gets straight to the point: “Children’s enjoyment of writing has fallen to ‘crisis point’, research finds.” And reading fares no better, with children continuing to show a resistance to reading literature. At the same time, financial investment in platforms such as ChatGPT has been compared to a “gold rush.” The upshot is not complicated: language is becoming thoroughly instrumentalized, valued mainly for its transactional capacity.

This is the real reason why Sports Illustrated and The Athletic have struggled. This is the real reason why The New Yorker recently announced “the end of the English Major.” People who cherish the beauty of language, its revelatory possibilities, its ability to provoke discourse and reflection, are simply a dying breed. Not even in a domain as popular and lucrative as sports are they safe. Of course, a Pangloss might counter that there are still places in our culture where word and book predominate—in churches, for example. Alas, even here it is increasingly less true. Biblical literacy is in a free fall, and clergy are already using ChatGPT to write sermons "in mere seconds.". With church attendance and membership plummeting, perhaps religious leaders need to save time for other duties. But this excuse actually demonstrates the circular nature of crisis: the more people are determined by a technological ethic of time efficiency and profit optimization, the less valuable activities such as writing poetry or listening to a sermon seem. Moreover, the less people engage in such “thick” activities, the more technology is needed to offset the damage, whether by publishing poems on a low-cost web content management system or using an AI-generated homily.

Indeed, words have never been cheaper. Why pay for The Athletic when you can get similar, if less polished, content on a free blogging network such as SB Nation? Why take the time to read Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) when ChatGPT can instantaneously and inexpensively produce a passable summary? As any good economist knows, “price elasticity” refers to the law by which prices rise and fall. When there is too much supply—it doesn’t matter if we’re talking about plastic pill organizers, sports writing, or liberal-arts degrees—value is diminished. This is what is called a “deflationary spiral.” Deflation initially engenders cost-cutting measures such as layoffs, but in the end it can lead to “depression”—the irony of which, alas, requires no further explanation.