13 Feb 2023

Forum Communications Choose Lede AI to Cover High School Sports in South Dakota

Lede AI is  excited to welcome Forum Communications as a new customer. Forum will use Lede AI to supplement and strengthen their high school sports results coverage in the Sioux Falls, South Dakota market starting in January 2023.

The project, led by Forum’s Director of Content Operations, Steve Wagner is not the company’s first experiment with automated content. They’ve previously used technology to cover youth hockey leagues for a special interest web vertical the company owns.

Forum is also participating in a two year project funded by the Knight Foundation that is focused on finding a path forward for thoughtful and effective deployment of AI in local newsrooms.

“We are interested in AI as a complement to the community journalism we produce on a daily basis,” Wagner said. “We want our journalists focusing on high-impact, local storytelling to maximize their time and talents, and partner with companies like Lede AI to deliver some of the basics that our audiences expect.”

Objectives

Forum Communications partnered with Lede AI because they knew there was a need for better and more consistent results-based coverage that answered the question, “Who won the game and what was the score?”

There’s just no time to pull all that together now in an SEO and reader-friendly package.

At the same time, they wanted to free up their reporters to do the impactful journalism only human-beings can do.

Through partners like Lede AI, local news brands can deliver high school sports scores and matters of record for a community while focusing staff efforts on unique and original storytelling, Wagner said. The company views AI content as a wire service to supplement a newsrooms’ commitment to hyper-local content, he said.

“We know readers expect robust local journalism from our newsrooms,” Wagner said. “Our reporters and editors are focusing on the journalism that can only be produced by trained professionals. We want to provide the contextual reporting readers can’t find elsewhere, including enterprise, investigative, analysis and well-written features that take time, talent and source-building to produce.”

What’s next?

Coverage launched in January of 2023 with regular round ups of boys and girls basketball results from the Sioux Falls market.