Use these AI ideas for your newsroom’s high school football coverage

Friday nights are about to get a whole lot busier in newsrooms across the country.

The Fall prep season is kicking off in many communities, signaling a busy but exciting time of the year for editorial teams.

As you establish your plans for the Fall, it’s important to consider how AI could play a helpful role for your organization.

Here are three ways you can use AI to help bolster your coverage.

1. Create layers and breakouts

After you write a game story or a profile on an athlete or a coach ask AI to create layers from that story for your package.

For example, if it’s a game story, use a prompt like: “Create a list of three numbers to know highlighting the most impressive stats from this game story.”

I did just that with a sports editor this past week. You can see the results here, which the sports editor felt was definitely usable in the story:

The same idea could be applied to a bio box that might run with a profile. Provide clear direction in the prompt, like “Provide a box to go with this story that includes the athlete’s name, age, school they are attending and biggest high school achievements so far.”

2. Repackage the best of what a coach said

Use a recording device like Otter when interviewing a coach or player, get the AI transcription from the interview (Otter offers this), copy and paste it into ChatGPT and ask it to provide you the best five quotes that the coach or player said.

This could serve as a really nice sidebar or list the next day that features those quotes. Fact check the quotes to make sure they are accurate, but this approach could create clickable content that is efficient to produce.

You could do something similar if there is a postgame press conference that is streamed on YouTube. If there is a recording, use a tool called Summarize.tech (https://www.summarize.tech/) and simply drop the YouTube link of the press conference in the tool and you’ll get a summary you can use to create that list of quotes.

3. Create weekly game schedules

Many news organizations run high school preview sections where each team’s schedule for the year is featured.

It would take some upfront work, but you could grab all of those schedules from your special section, drop them into ChatGPT and ask for it to create a week-by-week schedule of all of your teams for the season.

This would mean that if you run a list of games on tap every Friday, ChatGPT could do the heavy work for you in terms of building that weekly list of games.

I took a list of all of the high school games scheduled for the Fall season in a market and put the schedule into ChatGPT, asked it to create a week-by-week schedule and it worked quite well.

If the schedule for each team exists online and the schedule is accurate, you could grab a link that features that schedule and ask ChatGPT to create it for you.

This may be useful for the Fall season still, but could be a great idea to store away for winter sports. Here’s an example of one I created for a basketball team. I simply grabbed a link where the schedule was hosted and asked ChatGPT to create the schedule for me including both teams, times and if it was home or away.

In some cases, these ideas take your content and help get more out of it. In others, you can simply use the information that you already have (the interview) and create efficient and clickable content. All of this is in an effort to make your job easier and provide even more information to your readers.

We can help build an AI strategy for you: Contact me today at david@davidarkinconsuting.com or call/text me at 832 407 0188. I’d love to help you.