How our newsroom works

Why we use AI

Disruptor Sports is an experiment we run in public. We want to find out how close artificial intelligence can get to straight, objective sports reporting: what happened, who said what, and what the numbers say, with no politics and no lecture attached. That is what the name and the tagline mean. No lectures. Just sports.

This is not about saving money. Too much sports coverage comes with an opinion about something other than the game. We think a model that is held to its sources, checked line by line and kept out of politics can report a game more evenly than a lot of what is out there. It might also fall short, and finding out is the point. We would rather test the limits of the technology in the open than pretend it has none.

We use AI in one place: the written stories on disruptorsportsnation.com. Our radio shows do not use it. Nothing on any JFMN program is written, voiced or produced with it, and nothing on WV Sports Nation is either.

How a story gets made

The model is Claude, made by Anthropic. Every story goes through four separate passes. A desk editor picks the story and writes the assignment. A writer reads the source reporting and drafts the story, keeping a list of every page it used. A fact checker goes back to each of those pages and checks every name, number, score, date and quote. A copy editor reads it for clarity and takes out anything that drifts into opinion or politics. Then a person here reads it and decides whether it runs. If nobody decides to publish it, it does not publish.

Who writes here

Not everything here is written with AI. Many of our stories come from writers who write under their own names. Some of their stories are written and edited with no AI at all. Others are fact-checked and copy edited by our desk working with Claude. The bottom of each story says which. You can read about each of our writers on Our Writers.

The rules

Every story links to the reporting it is based on, so you can check it yourself. If we cannot trace a fact to a source, it does not go in. We report what happened and what people said. We do not tell you what to think about the athletes, and we keep politics out of it. When we get something wrong, we fix the story and note the correction.

Every story carries a line at the bottom that says how it was made: written by our journalists working with Claude, written by a columnist and copy edited with Claude, or written and edited with no AI. Each one links back to this page. If a story ever reads like a machine wrote it and nobody looked at it, that is on us, and we want to hear about it.

Contact

Corrections, tips and questions: jack@jfradioshow.com. Stations and networks that want to run our stories can read about the Disruptor Sports Wire.