Verification Before—and After—Generation: Why AI Answers Still Need to Be Checked
By Cheval John | Vallano Media
This article was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
The final version was reviewed, edited and fact-checked by the author
Graphics created with AI-assisted design tools.
Visual concepts, editorial direction, composition, and final creative decisions were developed by Vallano Media.
Once the research foundation was in place, artificial intelligence became much more useful.
It could compare sources, organize timelines, identify patterns across documents and suggest explanations for why different accounts appeared to conflict.
But that created a different problem: What happens when the AI gives an answer that sounds right?
An obviously poor answer is relatively easy to catch.
A polished answer is harder.
If an AI system produces a clear explanation, uses professional language and connects events in a logical sequence, there is a natural temptation to accept the result and move forward.
But coherence is not confirmation.
For Vallano Media, that led to another rule: Generation did not end the research process.
It triggered another verification process.
A Confident Answer Is Still Just an Answer
Generative AI can produce language that sounds remarkably certain.
That can be useful.
It can also create risk.
A response may contain accurate information, incomplete information, outdated information, unsupported connections or several of those at once.
Those categories are not always obvious from the writing itself.
There is no automatic warning attached to the sentence that happens to be wrong.
That changes how AI-generated material has to be read.
The question cannot simply be: Does this explanation make sense?
The better question is: What evidence would allow us to publish this explanation?
During the FIFA reporting process, useful AI responses were treated as working material rather than finished conclusions.
An answer could suggest a direction.
It could produce a hypothesis.
It could identify something worth investigating.
But before an AI-generated explanation influenced published copy, its important factual claims still had to be traced back to evidence.
Verification Happens at the Claim Level
An AI-generated paragraph can contain several different claims at once.
Imagine a response saying that one organization introduced a proposal, another group opposed it, that opposition caused the proposal to stall, and the controversy demonstrated a larger governance problem.
That may read like one coherent explanation.
It is actually several claims.
Did the organization introduce the proposal?
Did the other group oppose it?
Did that opposition actually cause the proposal to stall?
And is the governance conclusion an established fact or an interpretation?
Each deserves a level of scrutiny appropriate to the claim.
Routine background information may be relatively straightforward to confirm.
Consequential, disputed, causal or unusual claims generally require greater attention.
The first two claims in the example may be factual questions.
The causal claim is more demanding.
The final conclusion may be legitimate analysis, but it should still be presented as analysis rather than established fact.
This is why verification increasingly had to happen at the claim level.
A paragraph can be mostly accurate and still contain one sentence that changes the meaning of the entire story.
That sentence matters.
Sequence Does Not Automatically Mean Cause
Chronology can create another trap.
Event A happens.
Then Event B.
Then Event C.
It is easy to turn that sequence into a story in which A caused B and B caused C.
Sometimes that interpretation is supported.
Sometimes the events simply occurred in that order.
Journalism has to distinguish chronology from causation.
That means asking: Is there evidence that one development actually caused the next?
Did a participant say that it did?
Did independent reporting establish the relationship?
Or are we connecting the events because the sequence looks persuasive?
AI can be useful for turning complicated timelines into understandable narratives.
But that usefulness requires caution.
A compelling narrative becomes a problem when it adds certainty the evidence does not support.
Words such as because, caused, forced, prompted, resulted in and led to therefore deserve extra scrutiny.
A single verb can turn analysis into an unsupported factual claim.
Asking AI to Challenge Its Own Answer
One of the more useful changes in the workflow came when AI stopped being used only to produce answers.
It also began being prompted to challenge them.
After an explanation was generated, the next questions could include: What is weak about this conclusion?
Which claims are not fully supported?
What assumptions are being made?
What alternative explanation fits the same evidence?
Where might the analysis be confusing sequence with causation?
What would a skeptical editor challenge?
What evidence would weaken or disprove this interpretation?
This changed the role of AI.
Instead of functioning only as a generator, it could become part of an adversarial review process.
That did not turn AI into an independent fact-checker.
An AI critique still requires verification and should not be treated as independent evidence.
Its value was in surfacing questions, weaknesses and assumptions that could then be investigated against the evidence.
That introduced useful friction before publication.
And in journalism, friction can be valuable.
The fastest route from prompt to publication is not necessarily the safest one.
The First Answer Was Never Sacred
Another useful habit was refusing to treat the first AI response as authoritative.
The first answer could still be useful.
Sometimes its greatest value was showing how the system was framing the story.
That framing could then be examined.
Was it relying too heavily on one source?
Was it smoothing over uncertainty?
Was it turning a possible explanation into a definite one?
Was it giving too much weight to the most dramatic interpretation?
Was it leaving out an important stakeholder?
Was it treating secondary reporting as though it were primary evidence?
Those questions could produce a better second answer.
Then that answer could be challenged again.
This is not the same as repeatedly prompting AI until it gives the journalist the answer they already wanted.
That would simply automate confirmation bias.
The objective was the opposite: Make the conclusion harder to defend unless the evidence actually supports it.
Verification Sometimes Sends the Reporting Backward
Verification does not always move a story closer to publication.
Sometimes it sends the reporting backward.
An AI-generated claim might expose the need for another source.
A timeline comparison might reveal a date discrepancy.
A causal explanation might fall apart once the underlying reporting is examined.
A quote might need to be traced back to its original context.
In those situations, the next step is not better wording.
It is more reporting.
The process can therefore look less like: Research → AI → Draft → Publish
and more like: Research → AI analysis → verification → additional research → revised analysis → draft → verification again.
That loop may repeat several times.
From a pure speed perspective, that can look inefficient.
From a journalism perspective, that is the safeguard.
AI is useful not only when it helps finish the work faster, but also when it exposes where the work is not finished.
Verification Also Means Looking for What Is Missing
Errors are not limited to false statements.
Omissions can distort a story too.
An AI summary might accurately describe five important facts while leaving out a sixth fact that changes how the first five should be understood.
That means verification has to ask two questions: Is what I am seeing correct?
and: What am I not seeing?
This becomes particularly important in stories involving multiple organizations, competing interests or conflicting accounts.
A response may be technically accurate but still incomplete.
Which perspectives are represented?
Which are absent?
Does one side receive more explanation than another?
Did the summary emphasize conflict while overlooking agreement?
Did it omit a development that complicates the central narrative?
Those are editorial questions.
AI can help surface them.
It cannot resolve them automatically.
Video Courtesy of CrashCourse YouTube Channel
Red-Team Review Became Part of the Workflow
Over time, this adversarial questioning became more systematic.
Vallano Media began using what could be described as an editorial red-team review: deliberately challenging an argument, analysis or draft in an attempt to expose weaknesses before publication.
This is different from formal AI-security or cybersecurity red teaming.
The purpose here was editorial.
The review could look for unsupported factual claims, causal overreach, missing context, weak sourcing, contradictions, wording stronger than the evidence justified and assumptions disguised as conclusions.
The important shift was simple: Do not ask only how to strengthen an argument.
Ask how the argument could fail.
Generative AI naturally encourages forward momentum: Generate → refine → polish → publish.
Red-teaming interrupts that momentum.
It creates a deliberate stage where the objective changes from building the article to trying to break it.
If the argument survives that challenge and the underlying evidence continues to support it, confidence increases.
If it does not, the weakness has been discovered before publication rather than afterward.
Asking AI to Verify Itself Is Not Enough
There is an important distinction between verification and simply asking an AI system: Are you sure?
The system may reconsider its answer.
It may also confidently repeat the same mistake.
Real verification requires returning to evidence outside the generated response.
That may mean opening the original document.
Reading the full article rather than relying on a summary.
Checking the publication date.
Comparing independent reports.
Locating the original quote.
Reviewing the official statement.
Or acknowledging that confirmation is unavailable.
AI can help guide those steps.
It cannot substitute for them.
So the important question is not: Did AI verify the answer?
It is: What evidence ultimately verified the claim?
The Journalist Has to Be Willing to Reject the Output
Perhaps the most important verification skill is also the simplest.
The journalist has to be willing to say: No.
No, that conclusion is too strong.
No, the evidence does not establish causation.
No, that source is not sufficient.
No, those events should not be combined.
No, the answer is plausible but unverified.
No, that does not belong in the article.
This is where subject knowledge, skepticism and editorial judgment become essential.
AI can make suggestions quickly.
The professional decides which suggestions survive.
The goal is not to become better at accepting AI output.
It is to become better at determining which output deserves to survive the editorial process.
Verify Before and After Generation
The title of this chapter contains an important tension.
Verification should happen before generation because AI analysis is only as strong as the evidence being supplied.
But verification also has to happen after generation, because the system can introduce new assumptions, errors or interpretations while processing that evidence.
The workflow therefore becomes: Verify the inputs → generate the analysis → verify the output.
Then repeat whenever necessary.
That cycle became one of the clearest lessons from Vallano Media’s FIFA reporting process.
AI did not reduce the importance of verification.
It created another place where verification had to occur.
What Comes Next
Once the research foundation had been established and AI-generated conclusions had been tested, the next question became much more practical: What was AI actually useful for?
Not theoretically.
Not as a list of possible applications.
But inside the reporting project itself.
Where did it save time?
Where did it help organize information?
Where did it expose weaknesses?
And where did human judgment still have to take over?
Next week, chapter 4 will examine how AI actually assisted the reporting process — and where its role stopped.
THE GAME IS EVERYWHERE: How Streaming Changed College Sports
By Cheval John | Vallano Media
This article was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
The final version was reviewed, edited and fact-checked by the author
Graphics created with AI-assisted design tools.
Visual concepts, editorial direction, composition, and final creative decisions were developed by Vallano Media.
On a Saturday night in Huntsville, Texas, a Sam Houston football game can be local and national at the same time.
The stadium sits far from the country’s largest television production centers.
The broadcasters, camera operators and production staff may have connections to Huntsville, Houston and the surrounding region.
Yet when the game begins, their work can be distributed through an ESPN platform to eligible subscribers far beyond Huntsville.
That combination was much harder to achieve not that long ago.
Before streaming became a major part of college sports, programs outside the largest conferences often depended on regional television, local radio and school-operated webcasts for much of their exposure.
National television opportunities existed, but television had an unavoidable limitation: There were only so many hours available.
ESPN+ helped change that.
When ESPN+ launched on April 12, 2018, ESPN executives specifically described one of its intended audiences as fans who had limited access to teams they cared about—including alumni whose schools might otherwise receive little television exposure.
The service launched with thousands of college events across numerous conferences.
Eight years later, that idea has reshaped a substantial part of college sports.
Television Had A Scarcity Problem
ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU and other traditional networks have only 24 hours in a day.
College athletics does not.
Football, basketball, volleyball, soccer, baseball, softball and other sports frequently overlap across hundreds of campuses.
Traditional television forces networks to choose which events receive a channel.
Streaming created another shelf.
Conference USA’s ESPN agreement makes more than 450 live sporting events available through ESPN+ and ESPN3, including substantial inventories beyond football and men’s basketball.
The West Coast Conference offers an even larger example.
Its agreement with ESPN places more than 900 conference events each year on ESPN+, covering basketball, soccer, volleyball, water polo, baseball and softball.
The model was apparent from ESPN+’s beginning.
The Ivy League agreement announced just before the platform launched called for more than 1,100 conference events annually, with the majority distributed through ESPN+.
None of this means a Tuesday-night volleyball match suddenly attracts the audience of a Saturday SEC football game.
Streaming did not erase college athletics’ hierarchy.
What it changed was availability.
A game does not necessarily need one of a small number of national television windows simply to reach viewers beyond its local market.
The school can remain where it is.
The game can remain where it is.
The distribution can travel.
Huntsville Shows How The Model Evolved
Sam Houston provides a useful case study because its digital-broadcast history predates ESPN+.
Bearkat Sports Network began streaming Sam Houston sporting events annually in 2008 under the guidance of Jason Barfield.
By 2016, he was helping transition Sam Houston’s operation toward live ESPN productions.
The university later built production facilities that include a television and podcast studio and a central control room connected to multiple athletic venues.
By 2024, Bearkat Sports Network said it was responsible for nearly 80 ESPN+ productions annually, along with more than 50 live audio productions, press conferences, podcasts and studio programming.
That is no longer simply a school putting a radio call or basic video stream online.
It is local production infrastructure feeding a nationally distributed sports platform.
Barfield’s career illustrates what that can mean for the worker.
Before joining Sam Houston, he served as sports editor of The Huntsville Item.
He has called Bearkat baseball and soccer, worked football and basketball radio and handled both play-by-play and analyst roles on ESPN productions.
He did not have to leave Huntsville for his work to travel beyond Huntsville.
That may be one of streaming’s least-discussed effects.
The Worker Did Not Always Have To Move Either
For generations, one familiar route through sports media was geographical.
Start in a smaller market.
Develop a résumé.
Move to a larger market.
Then move again.
Maybe, eventually, reach a national platform.
That ladder still exists.
But streaming has expanded another route: sports-media professionals can gain experience on nationally distributed platforms without necessarily having to leave the markets where they built their careers.
Consider Rosie Langello.
Langello joined WSFA in Montgomery in January 2022 and became the station’s first female sports director.
In 2026, she moved into a primary news-anchor role.
She has also worked Troy football sidelines on ESPN+.
When Sam Houston opened its 2026 season at Troy, the ESPN+ crew featured Will Kollmeyer on play-by-play, Ben Stanfield as analyst and Langello reporting from the sideline.
That is an important distinction.
She does not have to choose between a regional television career in Alabama and participating in ESPN-distributed college sports.
She can do both.
Experience Can Travel In The Other Direction, Too
Will Kollmeyer represents another pathway.
Long before the current streaming era, Kollmeyer had already spent 18 years as sports director at WTVA in Tupelo, Mississippi, more than three years as sports director at WCBI and a decade working in public relations, marketing, sports information and broadcasting at Itawamba Community College.
When the SEC Network launched in 2014, Ole Miss selected Kollmeyer as one of its local play-by-play voices for locally produced network broadcasts.
More than a decade later, he remains part of the ESPN college-sports ecosystem, including that 2026 Troy-Sam Houston ESPN+ assignment.
His career shows that streaming does not merely create opportunities for newcomers.
It can also give experienced regional broadcasters another outlet for decades of accumulated knowledge.
A Student Can Now Enter The Same System
Then there is Gavan Baxley.
Baxley grew up attending Troy football games and later studied broadcast journalism at the university.
In October 2025, while still a senior, he went from watching Troy football from the stands to reporting from the sideline on ESPN+.
He graduated in spring 2026 with a degree in broadcast journalism and remained at Troy as an athletics broadcasting graduate assistant.
By September, Troy was identifying him in that role while he produced football previews and other athletics content.
That may be one of the clearest examples of how dramatically the entry point has changed.
A student in Troy, Alabama, can learn how to prepare for a live college broadcast, work with a production crew and gain experience on an ESPN platform before beginning the traditional sequence of professional-market moves.
Streaming did not eliminate the apprenticeship.
It brought the apprenticeship closer to the national distribution system.
Regional Television And ESPN Can Overlap
Randy McIlvoy adds another wrinkle.
McIlvoy is sports director at Houston’s KPRC 2 and continues to perform college play-by-play work for Rice, Houston and Sam Houston through university broadcast platforms.
His career also includes regional television work predating the modern streaming era.
On Sept. 19, 2026, McIlvoy called Sam Houston’s home football game against Nicholls on ESPN+ with John Harris and sideline reporter Kendra Sheehan.
At the same time, Jason Barfield and Brian Adams handled the Bearkat Sports Network radio broadcast, which was also available locally on KSHU 90.5 FM.
One game.
Multiple crews.
Local radio.
A university network.
A Houston television sports director.
National streaming.
That is the modern college-sports media ecosystem in miniature.
It also shows why this story is bigger than simply saying workers in small towns no longer need to leave.
Streaming has blurred the boundaries among local, regional and national work.
Video Courtesy of ESPN College Football YouTube Channel
Richmond Offers Another Version
Eastern Kentucky shows the same transformation from a different angle.
Wes Chandler spent 14 years working within the EKU Sports Network before being promoted in August 2026 to lead play-by-play responsibilities for football and men’s basketball.
Maggie Davis followed another path.
Davis is an anchor, reporter and producer for BBN Tonight at Lexington’s WLEX-TV.
She joined the EKU Sports Network in 2025-26 and has worked play-by-play, color analysis and sideline assignments across multiple sports.
In September 2026, Davis joined Chandler and Terry Johnson on the ESPN+ broadcast of Eastern Kentucky’s football game against Dayton.
Again, she did not have to abandon regional television to participate in nationally distributed college sports.
The jobs can overlap.
That is becoming the point.
The Old Ladder Is Becoming A Network
Taken together, these careers do not follow one pattern.
Barfield built his career within a university and local media ecosystem.
Langello combines regional television with ESPN+ sideline work.
Kollmeyer brought decades of local and regional broadcasting experience into ESPN-distributed college broadcasts.
Baxley gained ESPN+ experience before graduating and moved into a university broadcasting role.
Davis works in Lexington television while contributing to Eastern Kentucky broadcasts.
McIlvoy remains the sports director of a major-market television station while continuing college play-by-play work.
That diversity may be more important than any single résumé.
The modern sports-media career increasingly looks less like one ladder and more like a network of overlapping roles—broadcasting, local television, university media, digital production, freelance work, podcasts, social media and national streaming.
One person may participate in several of them.
ESPN+ Is Now Part Of An Even Larger Streaming System
The distribution infrastructure has continued to evolve.
ESPN’s current Unlimited offering provides access to its full suite of networks and services, and ESPN says the platform contains more than 47,000 live events annually.
Meanwhile, the ESPN+ library is now included in the ESPN Select offering.
ESPN content has also been integrated into Disney+.
Disney says subscribers with ESPN Select, ESPN Unlimited or qualifying bundles can access ESPN programming within Disney+. ESPN Select includes the ESPN+ library, while subscribers without an ESPN subscription receive only a curated sampling of ESPN content.
Individual events can also be affected by rights and blackout restrictions.
That distinction matters when discussing scale.
In Disney’s last detailed subscriber disclosure, the company reported 131.6 million Disney+ subscribers worldwide as of Sept. 27, 2025.
That does not mean 131.6 million people can watch a particular Sam Houston, Troy or Eastern Kentucky event.
The number describes the scale of the broader Disney+ ecosystem—not the addressable audience for an individual ESPN+ game.
But the evolution still matters.
A college sporting event produced in Huntsville, Troy or Richmond can now exist within a streaming environment connected to one of the world’s largest entertainment companies.
That is a radically different distribution environment from the one smaller college programs inhabited two decades ago.
Local Media Did Not Disappear
There is an easy mistake to make when telling this story.
National streaming did not eliminate local sports media.
If anything, the new environment makes the distinction between game distribution and community coverage clearer.
A national platform can carry the competition.
A local radio station can deliver a hometown call.
A university media operation can produce interviews, podcasts and highlights.
Local newspapers and independent digital publications can cover the coaches, athletes, facilities, attendance, recruiting and institutional decisions surrounding the program.
Social media can redistribute all of it again.
Sam Houston’s Nicholls broadcast illustrated several of those layers operating simultaneously: ESPN+ carried the game, Bearkat Sports Network produced its separate radio call, and KSHU provided an over-the-air local outlet.
Those platforms do not necessarily replace one another.
They perform different jobs.
ESPN can distribute the competition.
Local media can explain why the competition matters.
Small Market No Longer Has To Mean Small Reach
Streaming has not made Conference USA equal to the SEC.
It has not erased the financial differences between conferences.
It has not guaranteed large audiences for every game.
And it has not eliminated the advantages of working in Houston, New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles or another major media center.
But those are not the only ways to measure what changed.
ESPN+ helped weaken one of the basic limitations facing college sports outside the biggest conferences: Television could not carry everything.
Once that limitation weakened, another boundary weakened with it.
A broadcaster could build ESPN production experience in Huntsville.
A Montgomery television journalist could work the sideline in Troy.
A Lexington broadcaster could add Eastern Kentucky games to her portfolio.
A veteran Houston sports director could call a Sam Houston game on ESPN+ while another crew delivered the hometown radio broadcast.
And a college student could stand on an ESPN+ sideline before his professional career had even fully begun.
The games never stopped being local.
The communities never stopped mattering.
But the ceiling on how far the games—and the work behind them—could travel became much higher.
The game did not have to move.
The worker did not necessarily have to move.
The distribution did.
And that may be one of the most consequential changes ESPN+ brought to college sports beyond the power conferences.
Graphics created with AI-assisted design tools.
Visual concepts, editorial direction, composition, and final creative decisions were developed by Vallano Media.
How Sam Houston’s Return to Bowers Showed the Evolution of Bearkat Sports Media
By Cheval John | Vallano Media
This article was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
The final version was reviewed, edited and fact-checked by the author
Graphics created with AI-assisted design tools.
Visual concepts, editorial direction, composition, and final creative decisions were developed by Vallano Media.
With two minutes remaining in the first half of Sam Houston’s Sept. 12 game against Tulsa, the ESPN+ broadcast turned its attention away from the field.
The camera showed the rebuilt west side of Bowers Stadium, centerpiece of a roughly $60 million redevelopment that had kept the Bearkats away from their longtime home for the 2025 season.
Analyst John Harris looked at the new structure.
“That is a beautiful press box.”
It was a simple observation.
But Harris was particularly well positioned to make it.
Years earlier, he had worked Sam Houston games during a considerably different era of college sports television.
In 2016, Harris and Tom Franklin were part of Fox College Sports broadcasts involving Southland Conference programs, including Sam Houston.
By 2017, the pair were calling Sam Houston games on ESPN3.
The difference between those broadcasts and what surrounded Harris at Bowers in 2026 tells a larger story.
Sam Houston had not simply rebuilt its press box.
The media world around it had changed as well.
Video Courtesy of Mellie Valencia YouTube Channel
When Geography Mattered More
For much of college athletics history, following a program depended heavily on geography.
Local newspapers provided game stories and features.
Radio stations carried games within the reach of their signals.
University sports information offices supplied statistics and information to reporters.
Television opportunities, particularly for programs outside the largest conferences, were less predictable.
That placed enormous importance on local media.
Fans outside the immediate market could still follow their teams.
Newspapers traveled, radio signals extended beyond city limits and selected games reached regional or national television.
But geography imposed far greater limitations than it does today.
The arrival of digital media did not eliminate those limitations overnight.
Instead, another layer gradually developed alongside the existing system.
University and conference-produced digital coverage expanded the number of games that could reach viewers outside traditional television distribution.
By the middle of the 2010s, however, the result could still resemble a patchwork.
The Southland Conference’s 2016 football media guide listed television relationships involving ESPN networks, American Sports Network, Cox Sports Television, ROOT Sports Southwest, Fox College Sports and Time Warner Cable SportsChannel.
ESPN3 represented an important part of that transition.
Games could increasingly be accessed through computers, mobile devices and connected televisions rather than depending entirely on conventional television carriage.
The audience was becoming less geographically restricted.
The distribution system was still fragmented.
From ESPN3 to ESPN+
The next decade accelerated that transformation.
Streaming platforms became increasingly central to college sports distribution while conferences and universities expanded their own production capabilities.
Conference realignment and changing media agreements added another layer.
Sam Houston underwent its own extraordinary transformation during the same period.
The football program won the NCAA Division I Football Championship in spring 2021.
The university subsequently moved from the Southland Conference to the Western Athletic Conference before making the much larger jump to Conference USA and the Football Bowl Subdivision in 2023.
By 2026, many Sam Houston games could be watched without a viewer being anywhere near Huntsville.
A game no longer needed a traditional national television window to be nationally available through streaming.
That distinction matters.
National availability is not the same thing as national coverage.
Putting a game on a widely accessible streaming platform makes it possible for someone hundreds or thousands of miles away to watch.
It does not guarantee that national newspapers, television networks or major digital publications will assign journalists to independently report on that game.
Streaming removed much of the geographic distribution barrier.
It did not remove competition for attention.
The Newspaper Changed, Too
While universities and conferences gained new methods for reaching audiences directly, another part of the sports-media ecosystem was undergoing its own transformation.
The way Americans consumed local newspaper journalism was changing.
Pew Research Center found that 43 percent of U.S. adults said they received news from local daily newspapers at least sometimes in 2018.
By 2025, that figure had fallen to 36 percent.
The change in how those readers accessed newspapers was even more pronounced.
Among Americans who used local daily newspapers, 54 percent primarily used print editions in 2018 while 43 percent primarily accessed them online.
By 2025, only 30 percent primarily used print, while 68 percent primarily accessed their local daily newspaper digitally.
Those numbers cannot tell us how any particular newspaper staffs its sports department.
Nor should changes in newspaper readership automatically be used to assume that an individual newsroom eliminated reporters or reduced particular beats.
They do establish the changing distribution environment surrounding local journalism.
At the same time, universities, conferences and independent publishers gained increasingly direct ways to reach audiences.
The demand for sports information did not disappear.
Its distribution multiplied into different forms.
One Game, Many Media Systems
Sam Houston’s return to Bowers Stadium against Tulsa offered a snapshot of what that environment looks like today.
The game was carried on ESPN+, with Jason Metko handling play-by-play alongside Harris and Kendra Sheehan reporting from the sideline.
Radio provided another path.
The Bearkat Sports Network broadcast featured Jason Barfield and Brian Adams, with local carriage through KSHU 90.5 FM and digital access through Sam Houston athletics platforms.
KSAM 101.7 provided another local media presence from Bowers.
SiriusXM subscribers could find the game nationally as well, although the service carried Tulsa’s radio feed rather than the Bearkat Sports Network production.
Afterward, an Associated Press report carrying a Huntsville dateline could circulate through publications far beyond Walker County.
Traditional local journalism remained part of the picture.
So did a growing category of independent digital coverage.
Sidelines–Sam Houston, for example, describes itself as independent from the university while maintaining a digital presence focused specifically on Bearkat athletics.
That represents a form of sports coverage that would have been far more difficult to distribute broadly during the early decades of Bowers Stadium.
An outlet no longer needs a printing press, terrestrial transmitter or television station to build an audience around a university athletic program.
None of these media forms completely replaced another.
They accumulated.
A supporter could watch ESPN+, listen to radio coverage, follow social updates during the game, read newspaper or Associated Press coverage afterward and continue discussing the program through independent digital communities.
One football game had become several different media products at once.
Video Courtesy of Hello Huntsville Youtube Channel
Local No Longer Means Nearby
That may be one of the most significant changes of all.
Historically, local media often described both the subject being covered and the geographic community consuming it.
A Huntsville newspaper covered Sam Houston because Sam Houston was in Huntsville.
A Huntsville radio station naturally served listeners within reach of its signal.
Digital distribution increasingly separated those two ideas.
Today, an outlet can be intensely local in subject matter while serving an audience scattered across Texas, the United States or beyond.
A Sam Houston graduate living hundreds of miles from Huntsville can watch many of the same broadcasts, see many of the same photographs and participate in many of the same conversations as someone living a few blocks from campus.
In that environment, “local” increasingly describes what is being covered rather than where everyone consuming the coverage happens to live.
Sam Houston’s evolution does not represent every local sports market.
But it offers a useful case study of a broader change: geographic barriers around sports distribution have weakened while competition for audience attention has intensified.
The local newspaper is no longer competing for attention only with another newspaper, radio station or television station.
That attention can move among ESPN, university-produced content, conference platforms, independent publishers, podcasts, social media and countless other sources.
More distribution does not necessarily mean more journalism.
But it unquestionably means more choices.
Why the Press Box Still Matters
All of this creates an apparent contradiction.
If audiences can follow Sam Houston from almost anywhere, why does a university need increasingly sophisticated physical media infrastructure?
Because digital media is not actually created in the cloud.
It begins somewhere.
Cameras need positions.
Broadcasters need booths.
Production crews need connectivity.
Statistics have to be generated.
Photographers need working areas.
Interviews have to be conducted.
Game operations and broadcast personnel must communicate.
Sam Houston’s rebuilt west side reflects that reality.
The five-level facility includes much more than traditional newspaper workspace.
Its upper levels incorporate broadcast and production functions, game-day operations, coaches’ areas, suites, visiting administration space and dedicated areas for the press.
The modern press box is therefore not a monument to an older media era.
It is infrastructure for the new one.
When Bowers Stadium opened in 1986, geography placed much greater limits on how people could experience Sam Houston football.
Forty years later, fewer people need to be anywhere near Huntsville to follow a Bearkat game.
Yet reaching all of those distant screens, speakers and phones still requires people working somewhere physical.
The digital game still begins somewhere physical.
Harris had worked Sam Houston games during an earlier generation of college sports media.
Now, looking across a facility built for the demands of another generation, he offered a much simpler assessment.
“That is a beautiful press box.”
It was.
But what mattered more was everything now capable of traveling beyond it.
Graphics created with AI-assisted design tools.
Visual concepts, editorial direction, composition, and final creative decisions were developed by Vallano Media.
Give Your Audience Access To Your Creative Process
By Cheval John
Today’s post is a case study of former ABBA member, Anni-Frid Lyngstad’s, “Frida”, solo album, “Something Going On” and what we as entrepreneurs can learn.
ABBA was on top of the charts consistently during their time together (Agnetha Faltskog was married to Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson was married to Frida prior to the group forming of course).
Many were drawn to their acapella sound.
The success of the band led to the strain on their marriages.
Frida wanted to do a solo English album which would have a different sound from ABBA.
So she choose Phil Collins, who is a drummer as well, to produce her first solo english album.
She listened to Collins’ first solo album “Face Value” for eight months.
The record label, Polar Music, sent out messages to major publishers around the world about Frida’s solo project.
In an overwhelming answer, they got 500 songs.
They then listened to all of them and choose the eleven songs for her album.
Collins and the session players flew into Stockholm and recorded the album tracks.
They added the trumpets from Earth, Wind and Fire’s Phenix Horns to some of the tracks.
They also added the orchestra sound recorded at Air Studios in London, England.
It took them a month and a half to put the album together.
As a result, “Something Going On” was a huge hit worldwide.
The single,”I Know There’s Something Going On” hit number one in Switzerland, Belgium, Costa Rica and France.
It was also number fourteen on the Billboard 100 and became one of the best selling singles in the United States in 1983.
Before the advent of social media, publicists would book musicians on major media leading up to the launch of their album because those outlets have the largest audience.
What made Frida’s success different?
She gave Sveriges Television (SVT), a national Swedish broadcaster, access to the making from start to finish of the album, “Something Going On.”
SVT edited the recordings to make it into a one-hour television special.
It is safe to say Frida understood her audience very well.
She knew it was history in the making because she was venturing into the unknown from her association with ABBA.
That is why it is important to showcase the behind the scenes of your business and share the “secrets” to your success.
It is not like someone will go and knock you out of business due to sharing your secrets.
Your audience will appreciate you because of your willingness to take them on your journey to success with your business.
They will even go out of their way to share your finished product with their friends and family.
For example, you can allow your listeners to see the entire recording process of your podcast via live streaming.
In the same manner of television shows which records in front of a live studio audience, you can be that business or person which live streams your recordings to your audience.
You can let them know in advance that this live stream recording will last about 30 minutes while encouraging them to leave comments.
Once the live stream part of the recording is over, you can answer their questions as part of the post-production show.
If your podcast is interview based, this can allow your audience exclusive access to ask your guest questions in the comments section during the post-production.
This strategy can help you boost your podcast which is part of your business.
With third party applications like Blue Jeans Network, Zoom, and Crowdcast.io, you can simulcast your podcast recordings to either facebook live, periscope or YouTube Live.
So go out and allow your audience access to your creative process in the same manner as Frida did 35 years ago.
What are your thoughts on the case study?
The Rise of Cheddar TV: Building Business News for the Streaming Generation
By Cheval John | Vallano Media
This article was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
The final version was reviewed, edited and fact-checked by the author
Graphics created with AI-assisted design tools.
Visual concepts, editorial direction, composition, and final creative decisions were developed by Vallano Media.
When ESPN launched in 1979, the idea of dedicating an entire television network to sports was still a gamble.
The network ultimately demonstrated something important about specialized media: a passionate audience could support a destination built around its interests.
Nearly four decades later, entrepreneur Jon Steinberg made a different kind of media bet.
In 2016, Steinberg launched Cheddar, a digital-first business news network designed around the viewing habits of younger audiences.
Rather than trying to beat established financial networks such as CNBC and Bloomberg at the traditional cable television game, Cheddar built its strategy around an emerging reality: people were increasingly consuming video through streaming platforms, smartphones, computers, and social media.
Cheddar did not invent streaming, of course.
But it recognized early that changing distribution could create an opening in an established media industry.
That makes its rise more than a story about financial journalism.
It is a business case study about finding an underserved audience, building around changing consumer behavior, and understanding that distribution can sometimes be as important as the content itself.
It also has an interesting parallel in sports media.
Finding an Opportunity in an Established Market
Before founding Cheddar, Steinberg had already accumulated significant experience in digital media, including serving as president and chief operating officer of BuzzFeed and later leading Daily Mail North America.
That experience gave him a front-row view of changing audience habits.
With Cheddar, he bet that younger viewers could be reached with business news designed around digital distribution rather than the traditional cable model.
The network still covered financial markets, but its editorial universe stretched beyond stock prices and quarterly earnings.
Technology, startups, venture capital, entrepreneurship, media, consumer products, and innovation became important parts of the programming.
That distinction mattered.
Someone didn’t necessarily need to be an active stock trader to care about the next technology company, an emerging consumer brand, or an entrepreneur building a startup.
Cheddar was essentially broadening the definition of who might be interested in business television.
Built for Streaming From the Beginning
One of Cheddar’s most important advantages was that digital distribution wasn’t something added years after the network launched.
It was fundamental to the original concept.
Cheddar distributed programming through streaming services, connected television platforms, social media, and other digital outlets.
By the time Altice USA announced its acquisition of Cheddar in 2019, the company’s reach had become substantial.
Altice said Cheddar was available in approximately 40 million pay-TV homes, distributed through virtual television services including YouTube TV and Sling TV, and available through free streaming platforms including Pluto TV and the Roku Channel.
Altice also reported that Cheddar’s content generated more than 400 million monthly video views across social platforms at the time.
Those figures came from the acquiring company rather than an independent audience audit, but they illustrate how aggressively Cheddar had expanded beyond a conventional television channel.
The strategy was simple: don’t make the audience come looking for you.
Go where the audience already is.
Credibility in a New Format
Being digital-first did not mean abandoning the symbols associated with traditional financial journalism.
Cheddar established a major broadcasting presence on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
It also expanded its New York production footprint to locations including Nasdaq MarketSite and the Flatiron Building.
That was smart branding.
The NYSE gave a young streaming network an immediate visual connection to Wall Street, while Cheddar’s presentation, graphics, subject matter, and distribution strategy signaled that it wasn’t trying to recreate traditional financial television.
It wanted credibility without looking old.
That balance helped establish a recognizable identity in an industry already occupied by much larger competitors.
Where Sports Media Enters the Story
This is where Cheddar becomes especially interesting from a sports media perspective.
Cheddar did not create the streaming transformation in sports, nor did sports organizations simply copy its strategy.
The connection is more useful than that: both illustrate how media businesses responded to audiences gaining more control over where, when, and how they consumed content.
Sports organizations have faced many of the same questions.
What happens when fans no longer depend on one television package?
What happens when highlights are consumed on phones?
What happens when fans want interviews, documentaries, analysis, behind-the-scenes material, and live events across multiple platforms?
The answer increasingly has been for leagues, conferences, teams, and broadcasters to think beyond the traditional television channel.
Cheddar was confronting essentially the same distribution problem in business journalism.
It recognized that producing the content was only part of the job.
Making that content accessible was another part entirely.
Video Courtesy of Chat Sports YouTube Channel
Distribution as a Business Strategy
That distinction is easy to overlook.
A company can produce excellent journalism, a university can produce an excellent sporting event, and an independent creator can produce an excellent video.
None of that guarantees an audience will find it.
Distribution determines how easily that product travels.
Cheddar treated distribution as part of the product itself.
That approach helped the network appear in numerous places rather than depending on viewers developing one particular viewing habit.
For sports organizations, the comparison is particularly relevant because media distribution has become inseparable from the sports business.
Streaming services, conference networks, direct-to-consumer products, social media clips, team-produced documentaries, and athlete-created content all compete for a fan’s limited attention.
The platforms may be different, but the underlying business question remains remarkably similar:
Where is the audience, and how do we make it easier for them to reach us?
The $200 Million Milestone
Cheddar’s growth eventually attracted a much larger media company.
In June 2019, Altice USA completed its acquisition of Cheddar for $200 million, subject to customary closing adjustments.
For a company founded only three years earlier, the transaction represented a remarkable milestone.
It also provided evidence that digital-first distribution and a differentiated audience could create substantial business value even in a market dominated by established television networks.
But the acquisition was not the end of Cheddar’s story.
In April 2021, around the network’s fifth anniversary, the brand became Cheddar News.
By then, its coverage extended across business, technology, media, culture, politics, and other areas.
The evolution showed that Cheddar itself was continuing to change.
And that leads to perhaps the most important lesson in the entire story.
Being Early Doesn’t Mean You Can Stop Adapting
The media environment Cheddar entered in 2016 became dramatically more competitive.
Streaming services multiplied.
Podcasts became major sources of business information.
YouTube creators built their own media brands.
Newsletters gave individual writers direct access to audiences.
Social platforms turned entrepreneurs, executives, athletes, and analysts into publishers themselves.
Traditional media companies also became much more aggressive about streaming and digital distribution.
In other words, some of the characteristics that made Cheddar unusual in 2016 became increasingly normal.
That’s one of the paradoxes of innovation.
A company can correctly identify the future and still have to compete once everyone else arrives there.
Cheddar’s ownership changed again in December 2023 when Altice USA sold Cheddar News to Archetype.
Financial terms of that transaction were not disclosed.
The sale shouldn’t erase what Cheddar accomplished, nor should its earlier $200 million acquisition be treated as proof that the original model was permanently solved.
Together, those events tell a more useful business story.
Innovation creates an advantage.
It does not guarantee that the advantage lasts forever.
What Content Creators Can Learn From Cheddar
There are several lessons here for independent publishers, entrepreneurs, and digital creators.
The first is to look for audiences established competitors may be underserving.
Cheddar did not need every CNBC or Bloomberg viewer to switch networks.
It needed to establish a meaningful audience of its own.
Second, distribution deserves nearly as much thought as production.
Publishing an article isn’t a distribution strategy.
Neither is uploading a video and hoping people discover it.
Search, social media, newsletters, streaming platforms, partnerships, and direct audience relationships can all extend the life of the original content.
Third, differentiation matters.
Cheddar didn’t establish itself by simply becoming a smaller CNBC.
Its younger presentation, technology coverage, startup focus, and streaming-first distribution gave viewers a reason to understand the brand differently.
Finally, adaptation never ends.
The strategy that differentiates a company today may become standard industry practice tomorrow.
The Sports Business Lesson
That last lesson may be especially important in sports.
A league might sign an innovative streaming agreement.
A conference might build a successful digital network.
A university might develop an impressive in-house production operation.
But technology continues moving.
Audience habits continue changing.
The next distribution model eventually arrives.
That means the goal cannot simply be to “go digital” or “start streaming.”
Those are tools, not permanent strategies.
The deeper objective is understanding how the audience behaves and being willing to change as those behaviors change.
That was the opportunity Cheddar recognized in 2016.
Cheddar’s Story Is Still Being Written
Cheddar did not disappear after the 2023 ownership change.
The brand has continued operating and expanding its streaming distribution, remaining focused on areas including business, technology, finance, and innovation.
That makes Cheddar more interesting than a simple rise-and-fall story.
It began as a startup challenging assumptions about financial television.
Within three years, it was acquired for $200 million.
It subsequently expanded its editorial identity, changed ownership again, and continued operating in a media industry that looks considerably different from the one it entered.
Its trajectory illustrates both sides of disruption.
Recognizing change early can create enormous opportunity.
But eventually, everyone else recognizes the change too.
Final Thoughts
Cheddar’s rise was never simply about creating another financial news channel.
It was about recognizing that the relationship between audiences and media was changing.
The company understood that younger viewers could be interested in business, technology, entrepreneurship, and finance without consuming those subjects in the same way previous generations had.
And in that sense, its story connects naturally with sports.
Sports fans didn’t suddenly stop caring about sports when their viewing habits changed.
Business audiences didn’t suddenly stop caring about business when they moved away from traditional television.
The audience didn’t disappear.
The audience moved.
Cheddar’s bet was to move with it.
That remains a valuable lesson for media companies, sports organizations, entrepreneurs, and independent publishers today.
Getting ahead of the next change matters.
Understanding that you’ll eventually have to change again may matter even more.
Graphics created with AI-assisted design tools.
Visual concepts, editorial direction, composition, and final creative decisions were developed by Vallano Media.
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