The Athletic spent the past week covering both the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics simultaneously, deploying approximately 55 people for Super Bowl coverage and roughly 30 for the Games in Milan-Cortina. Amid all of that, the New York Times-owned sports outlet was also trying to answer a question that every major publisher is grappling with right now: how do you protect your reporting from getting lifted and repurposed by AI?
Their answer, at least for now, is live blogs and video.
Written articles are easy for AI systems to scrape, summarize, and serve to users without ever sending them to The Athletic’s website. But live blogs are harder to replicate because they’re updated in real time, and video is harder to scrape because extracting useful information from it requires significantly more computing power than lifting text from an article.
“The one thing that AI isn’t as good at is the live experience,” editorial director Sarah Goldstein told Digiday. “And so we can be that expert for you in the moment. Humans will always be faster.”
That said, the live blog push isn’t entirely about staying ahead of AI. Laura Williamson, editor in chief of The Athletic U.K., told Digiday’s Sara Guaglione that the goal is to give readers something they can’t get simply by watching the game.
“We don’t want play-by-play updates, because fans are watching. They can see that,” she said. “It’s what we can give them extra, effectively, that we’re really interested in. Or a bit of personality, a bit of fun.”
The Athletic’s entire business model has always depended on offering something better than what’s freely available elsewhere. When the company launched in 2016, that meant hiring established beat writers away from newspapers and giving them the space to do their best work without chasing clicks. Co-founder Alex Mather infamously told The New York Times the plan was to let local newspapers “bleed” and “suck them dry” of talent — a quote that aged about as well as you’d expect from a startup that burned through money at a staggering rate before eventually selling to the Times for $550 million.
That same instinct — to find coverage readers can’t easily get anywhere else — is what’s now driving its push into live blogs and video. So in that same sense, leaning into live blogs isn’t a radical reinvention so much as the latest version of the same strategy. The Athletic’s live blogs have existed since 2021, but what’s new is the video component and the explicit framing of the format as a hedge against AI scraping.
“The biggest thing is just trying to show everyone what it’s like to be here and be part of that moment,” Goldstein said. “Not everyone wants to sit and read a full story. Not everyone has time. But you do have time to become smarter in a 90-second video. Or as you’re watching the game, if you have a question about something, a live blog is going to help answer that.”
Whether live blogs and video meaningfully protect The Athletic from AI scraping over the long term remains to be seen. The technology moves quickly enough that whatever advantage exists today may not exist six months from now. But the larger point here is that being there still counts. And for a company that has spent years arguing that access and perspective are worth paying for, that’s probably the best bet to make.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.