"While live blogs have been around for years, The Athletic sees live formats as a way to keep audiences on its platform, while insulating its reporting from getting scraped and repurposed by AI tools. "The one thing that AI isn't as good at is the live experience. And so we can be that expert for you in the moment. Humans will always be faster," said Sarah Goldstein, editorial director at The Athletic."
"At a time when written content is increasingly fueling AI answer engines, The Athletic is betting that injecting video into its live blogging is both stickier for fans - and better protected. The publisher began adding videos to its live blog feeds (which have been around since 2021) just last month, said Laura Williamson, editor in chief of The Athletic U.K. The Athletic hired Shaneika Dabney-Henderson as its first global head of video last month."
""I'm mindful that in today's AI world, the one thing [AI] can't generate is [real-time] information. So that push to break news and nuggets of information - [such as] what you're hearing, what you're seeing - make it really vibrant. It comes alive," Williamson said. "We don't want play-by-play updates, because fans are watching. They can see that. It's what we can give them extra, effectively, that we're really interested in. Or a bit of personality, a bit of fun.""
A sports publisher is prioritizing live blogs augmented with video to keep audiences on its platform and to make reporting harder for AI scraping and repurposing. The publisher has started adding videos to live blog feeds and hired a global head of video to expand real-time multimedia coverage. The live experience and human speed are presented as competitive advantages over AI. Audience metrics rose, with 16.9 million unique visitors in January 2026, up 59% year over year. Advances in retrieval-augmented generation raise risks that AI could tap live feeds, prompting emphasis on distinct real-time content.
Read at Digiday
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]