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.
High school and small-college sports are easier to watch, track and discuss than they were a generation ago.
But as traditional newsrooms continue cutting sports staffs, more content does not necessarily mean more independent journalism.
On a Friday night, the stadium can still be full.
Parents check scores on their phones.
Players post highlights before leaving the parking lot.
Coaches communicate directly with their communities.
Fans who cannot attend may be able to stream the game from home.
The underlying activity has not disappeared.
High school sports recorded 8,415,684 participation entries during the 2025-26 school year, another all-time high and an increase of 149,440 from the previous year.
The National Federation of State High School Associations compiles those figures through its member state associations, making the total a broad measure of participation across American high school athletics.
There are also more ways to follow those athletes than previous generations had.
Scores update quickly. Highlights circulate across social platforms.
Schools can produce broadcasts themselves.
Streaming has made thousands of games available beyond the communities where they are played.
The games are increasingly visible.
Yet another part of the local sports ecosystem is shrinking.
The independent reporter in the press box.
The games remain. Many of the jobs do not.
The change became particularly visible again this fall.
On Oct. 1, multiple USA TODAY Co. sports staffers publicly announced that their positions had been eliminated.
Akeem Glaspie had been covering Butler basketball.
Michael Chavez said the company eliminated his position covering Mississippi high school sports.
Sherlon Christie, a senior trending editor, announced his departure after 22 years with the company.
The full scope of the cuts was not immediately clear.
Only weeks earlier, McClatchy eliminated a majority of the positions in the Lexington Herald-Leader newsroom.
The cuts included three sports reporters, according to Kentucky Public Radio.
Those departures matter for reasons that extend beyond the number of jobs lost.
For generations, the local sports reporter was part of the infrastructure surrounding a community’s teams.
The reporter knew the schools.
The coaches.
The administrators.
The rivalries.
The history behind why one game mattered more than another.
Over years, that person might watch an athlete become a coach, an assistant become a head coach or a struggling program become a contender.
That kind of institutional knowledge is difficult to replace with a scoreboard.
This is bigger than the sports department
What is happening in press boxes reflects a much larger transformation in local journalism.
Nearly 40 percent of local U.S. newspapers have disappeared since 2005, according to Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative.
More than 270,000 newspaper jobs have been lost over that period, a decline of more than 75 percent.
Across journalism occupations more broadly, employment fell a little more than 7 percent from 2023 to 2024.
Digital publishing has not simply recreated the economics that supported those newsrooms.
Medill examined web traffic at 100 of the country’s largest newspaper sites and found that their average monthly pageviews declined by more than 45 percent over four years.
Only 11 of the 100 recorded growth during that period.
At the same time, local journalism itself has not disappeared.
In 2005, newspapers employed 71 percent of U.S. reporters.
By 2024, that share had fallen to 29 percent, while digital media and broadcast reporting each accounted for roughly a quarter of journalism employment.
That distinction matters.
The story is not simply that journalism is disappearing.
Where journalism happens is changing.
More content is not the same thing as more journalism
That becomes particularly important in sports.
A high school can livestream its football game.
That is useful.
A university can produce an ESPN+ broadcast.
That is useful too.
A coach can post highlights.
A parent can upload video.
A recruiting service can track prospects.
An independent creator can operate a podcast, newsletter or YouTube channel.
A school can distribute its own interviews, statistics and behind-the-scenes content.
Each can add something valuable to the sports-media ecosystem.
But they do not necessarily perform the same function.
A team’s social account represents the team.
An athletic department’s media operation represents the institution.
A recruiting service serves a particular audience.
A streaming platform primarily distributes the competition.
Independent journalism serves another purpose.
Someone still needs to ask why a decision was made.
Someone needs to provide context when something changes.
Someone needs to verify conflicting accounts rather than merely repeat them.
Someone needs to cover athletes, coaches and institutions as more than statistics, recruiting rankings or highlight clips.
And sometimes the most important story has little to do with the final score.
Streaming solved one problem while exposing another
Small-college sports provides one of the clearest examples of the tension.
Technology solved much of the old distribution problem.
Sam Houston offers a useful case study.
In 2008, Jason Barfield was leading the operation that became Bearkat Sports Network, which was streaming more than 60 Sam Houston sporting events annually.
In 2016, he began transitioning live-event production toward ESPN.
The operation continued to grow.
By 2024, Sam Houston said Bearkat Sports Network was responsible for nearly 80 ESPN+ productions each year, along with more than 50 live audio productions, press conferences, podcasts and studio programming.
That is genuine progress.
A game produced in Huntsville, Texas, no longer has to remain primarily a Huntsville experience.
But Bearkat Sports Network and ESPN serve different purposes from The Huntsville Item or an independent journalist covering Sam Houston.
One can show the game.
Another may need to report independently on the institution, its decisions and the people around the program.
Those roles can coexist.
Ideally, they should.
The danger comes when growth in the first category creates the impression that the second is no longer necessary.
Video Courtesy of ESPN College Football YouTube Channel
The patchwork is replacing the old model
The future of local sports media is unlikely to belong to one type of organization.
Traditional newspapers remain part of it.
So do television and radio.
But coverage increasingly can come from independent digital publications, newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels, photographers, school broadcasts, university media operations and individual creators.
There are advantages to that fragmentation.
A reporter who loses a newspaper position no longer needs another newspaper to grant permission to keep reporting.
A broadcaster can create a podcast.
A photographer can build a direct relationship with an audience.
A journalist with deep knowledge of one conference, school or region can build a specialized publication around an audience that a larger outlet considers too small.
The barriers to publishing have fallen dramatically.
The cost of sustained original reporting has not fallen nearly as far.
Travel costs money.
Covering teams every week takes time.
Building sources can take years.
Public-records work requires patience and expertise.
Attending games, practices, press conferences, school-board meetings and community events requires somebody to show up.
Someone still has to fund that work.
That is the unresolved problem.
AI makes the distinction even sharper
Artificial intelligence adds another layer to the economic challenge.
Routine sports information is particularly easy to summarize: Scores. Schedules. Standings. Statistics.
Basic game results.
A reader increasingly may be able to obtain those answers without visiting the publication that originally gathered or organized the information.
Medill identified the integration of generative AI into search engines as an additional challenge for publishers, noting that users can increasingly encounter summarized information before reaching the underlying source.
The decline of local journalism began long before generative AI, so AI should not be treated as the cause of that decades-long contraction.
It is another pressure on an already disrupted business model.
That makes commodity information harder to build a business around.
But it may make another category of journalism more valuable: information that does not exist until someone reports it.
AI can summarize a press conference once a recording, transcript or report exists.
It can search documents, compare information and identify patterns.
It can help journalists organize research, test claims and work more efficiently.
But it does not eliminate the need for the sourcing and firsthand reporting that put new information into the record.
Local knowledge that has never entered that record still has to be sourced, verified and reported.
The easier existing information becomes to summarize and redistribute, the more valuable original sourcing, verification and local context can become.
That creates an opportunity, too
The decline of the old model does not necessarily mean the end of local sports journalism.
It may mean its business structure has to change.
Independent publishers could become part of the answer.
So could memberships.
Subscriptions.
Sponsorships.
Nonprofit newsrooms.
Local radio partnerships.
Newsletters.
Podcasts.
Specialized digital publications.
No single model is guaranteed to replace what newspapers once supported.
But the migration of journalism employment beyond newspapers demonstrates that the profession itself is already adapting.
Broadcast and digital media now employ substantial shares of U.S. journalists even as newspaper employment continues to contract.
The challenge is ensuring that the new structure can financially support enough people to do original reporting consistently.
There is still something to cover
The audience has not vanished.
More than 8.4 million high school sports participation entries were recorded during the 2025-26 school year.
Thousands of schools stream events.
College programs outside the largest conferences can place games on national digital platforms.
Athletes can communicate directly with fans.
Communities can follow teams from almost anywhere.
Technology has made the competition dramatically easier to see.
That is worth celebrating.
But visibility alone does not create journalism.
A community can have livestreams, highlights, statistics, podcasts and hundreds of social-media posts about its teams while still losing something important if nobody is being paid to independently follow those teams week after week.
The future therefore presents two different questions.
The first has largely been answered: How do we make the games easier to see?
Technology solved much of that problem.
The harder question remains: Who is going to keep showing up to report what happens around them?
Because the game can be everywhere.
That does not automatically mean the journalism will be. Graphics created with AI-assisted design tools.
Visual concepts, editorial direction, composition, and final creative decisions were developed by Vallano Media.
The Game Is Everywhere: Who Is Left to Cover It?
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.
High school and small-college sports are easier to watch, track and discuss than they were a generation ago.
But as traditional newsrooms continue cutting sports staffs, more content does not necessarily mean more independent journalism.
On a Friday night, the stadium can still be full.
Parents check scores on their phones.
Players post highlights before leaving the parking lot.
Coaches communicate directly with their communities.
Fans who cannot attend may be able to stream the game from home.
The underlying activity has not disappeared.
High school sports recorded 8,415,684 participation entries during the 2025-26 school year, another all-time high and an increase of 149,440 from the previous year.
The National Federation of State High School Associations compiles those figures through its member state associations, making the total a broad measure of participation across American high school athletics.
There are also more ways to follow those athletes than previous generations had.
Scores update quickly. Highlights circulate across social platforms.
Schools can produce broadcasts themselves.
Streaming has made thousands of games available beyond the communities where they are played.
The games are increasingly visible.
Yet another part of the local sports ecosystem is shrinking.
The independent reporter in the press box.
The games remain. Many of the jobs do not.
The change became particularly visible again this fall.
On Oct. 1, multiple USA TODAY Co. sports staffers publicly announced that their positions had been eliminated.
Akeem Glaspie had been covering Butler basketball.
Michael Chavez said the company eliminated his position covering Mississippi high school sports.
Sherlon Christie, a senior trending editor, announced his departure after 22 years with the company.
The full scope of the cuts was not immediately clear.
Only weeks earlier, McClatchy eliminated a majority of the positions in the Lexington Herald-Leader newsroom.
The cuts included three sports reporters, according to Kentucky Public Radio.
Those departures matter for reasons that extend beyond the number of jobs lost.
For generations, the local sports reporter was part of the infrastructure surrounding a community’s teams.
The reporter knew the schools.
The coaches.
The administrators.
The rivalries.
The history behind why one game mattered more than another.
Over years, that person might watch an athlete become a coach, an assistant become a head coach or a struggling program become a contender.
That kind of institutional knowledge is difficult to replace with a scoreboard.
This is bigger than the sports department
What is happening in press boxes reflects a much larger transformation in local journalism.
Nearly 40 percent of local U.S. newspapers have disappeared since 2005, according to Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative.
More than 270,000 newspaper jobs have been lost over that period, a decline of more than 75 percent.
Across journalism occupations more broadly, employment fell a little more than 7 percent from 2023 to 2024.
Digital publishing has not simply recreated the economics that supported those newsrooms.
Medill examined web traffic at 100 of the country’s largest newspaper sites and found that their average monthly pageviews declined by more than 45 percent over four years.
Only 11 of the 100 recorded growth during that period.
At the same time, local journalism itself has not disappeared.
In 2005, newspapers employed 71 percent of U.S. reporters.
By 2024, that share had fallen to 29 percent, while digital media and broadcast reporting each accounted for roughly a quarter of journalism employment.
That distinction matters.
The story is not simply that journalism is disappearing.
Where journalism happens is changing.
More content is not the same thing as more journalism
That becomes particularly important in sports.
A high school can livestream its football game.
That is useful.
A university can produce an ESPN+ broadcast.
That is useful too.
A coach can post highlights.
A parent can upload video.
A recruiting service can track prospects.
An independent creator can operate a podcast, newsletter or YouTube channel.
A school can distribute its own interviews, statistics and behind-the-scenes content.
Each can add something valuable to the sports-media ecosystem.
But they do not necessarily perform the same function.
A team’s social account represents the team.
An athletic department’s media operation represents the institution.
A recruiting service serves a particular audience.
A streaming platform primarily distributes the competition.
Independent journalism serves another purpose.
Someone still needs to ask why a decision was made.
Someone needs to provide context when something changes.
Someone needs to verify conflicting accounts rather than merely repeat them.
Someone needs to cover athletes, coaches and institutions as more than statistics, recruiting rankings or highlight clips.
And sometimes the most important story has little to do with the final score.
Streaming solved one problem while exposing another
Small-college sports provides one of the clearest examples of the tension.
Technology solved much of the old distribution problem.
Sam Houston offers a useful case study.
In 2008, Jason Barfield was leading the operation that became Bearkat Sports Network, which was streaming more than 60 Sam Houston sporting events annually.
In 2016, he began transitioning live-event production toward ESPN.
The operation continued to grow.
By 2024, Sam Houston said Bearkat Sports Network was responsible for nearly 80 ESPN+ productions each year, along with more than 50 live audio productions, press conferences, podcasts and studio programming.
That is genuine progress.
A game produced in Huntsville, Texas, no longer has to remain primarily a Huntsville experience.
But Bearkat Sports Network and ESPN serve different purposes from The Huntsville Item or an independent journalist covering Sam Houston.
One can show the game.
Another may need to report independently on the institution, its decisions and the people around the program.
Those roles can coexist.
Ideally, they should.
The danger comes when growth in the first category creates the impression that the second is no longer necessary.
Video Courtesy of ESPN College Football YouTube Channel
The patchwork is replacing the old model
The future of local sports media is unlikely to belong to one type of organization.
Traditional newspapers remain part of it.
So do television and radio.
But coverage increasingly can come from independent digital publications, newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels, photographers, school broadcasts, university media operations and individual creators.
There are advantages to that fragmentation.
A reporter who loses a newspaper position no longer needs another newspaper to grant permission to keep reporting.
A broadcaster can create a podcast.
A photographer can build a direct relationship with an audience.
A journalist with deep knowledge of one conference, school or region can build a specialized publication around an audience that a larger outlet considers too small.
The barriers to publishing have fallen dramatically.
The cost of sustained original reporting has not fallen nearly as far.
Travel costs money.
Covering teams every week takes time.
Building sources can take years.
Public-records work requires patience and expertise.
Attending games, practices, press conferences, school-board meetings and community events requires somebody to show up.
Someone still has to fund that work.
That is the unresolved problem.
AI makes the distinction even sharper
Artificial intelligence adds another layer to the economic challenge.
Routine sports information is particularly easy to summarize: Scores. Schedules. Standings. Statistics.
Basic game results.
A reader increasingly may be able to obtain those answers without visiting the publication that originally gathered or organized the information.
Medill identified the integration of generative AI into search engines as an additional challenge for publishers, noting that users can increasingly encounter summarized information before reaching the underlying source.
The decline of local journalism began long before generative AI, so AI should not be treated as the cause of that decades-long contraction.
It is another pressure on an already disrupted business model.
That makes commodity information harder to build a business around.
But it may make another category of journalism more valuable: information that does not exist until someone reports it.
AI can summarize a press conference once a recording, transcript or report exists.
It can search documents, compare information and identify patterns.
It can help journalists organize research, test claims and work more efficiently.
But it does not eliminate the need for the sourcing and firsthand reporting that put new information into the record.
Local knowledge that has never entered that record still has to be sourced, verified and reported.
The easier existing information becomes to summarize and redistribute, the more valuable original sourcing, verification and local context can become.
That creates an opportunity, too
The decline of the old model does not necessarily mean the end of local sports journalism.
It may mean its business structure has to change.
Independent publishers could become part of the answer.
So could memberships.
Subscriptions.
Sponsorships.
Nonprofit newsrooms.
Local radio partnerships.
Newsletters.
Podcasts.
Specialized digital publications.
No single model is guaranteed to replace what newspapers once supported.
But the migration of journalism employment beyond newspapers demonstrates that the profession itself is already adapting.
Broadcast and digital media now employ substantial shares of U.S. journalists even as newspaper employment continues to contract.
The challenge is ensuring that the new structure can financially support enough people to do original reporting consistently.
There is still something to cover
The audience has not vanished.
More than 8.4 million high school sports participation entries were recorded during the 2025-26 school year.
Thousands of schools stream events.
College programs outside the largest conferences can place games on national digital platforms.
Athletes can communicate directly with fans.
Communities can follow teams from almost anywhere.
Technology has made the competition dramatically easier to see.
That is worth celebrating.
But visibility alone does not create journalism.
A community can have livestreams, highlights, statistics, podcasts and hundreds of social-media posts about its teams while still losing something important if nobody is being paid to independently follow those teams week after week.
The future therefore presents two different questions.
The first has largely been answered: How do we make the games easier to see?
Technology solved much of that problem.
The harder question remains: Who is going to keep showing up to report what happens around them?
Because the game can be everywhere.
That does not automatically mean the journalism will be.
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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