How does one of the world’s largest newsrooms of sports journalists drive strong growth in referral traffic as AI overviews threaten to suck the air out of the room? 

“For a publisher like ours, whose entire identity really is built on writer credibility, what’s happening right now isn’t really a threat. If you’re really, really investing in journalism, it’s something that could serve as an advantage,” said Claudio Cabrera, The Athletic’s vice president of newsroom strategy and audience, who oversees a team of 35 people which is embedded in the newsroom.

Twitter is a major avenue of traffic for The Athletic (owned by The New York Times), with their writers’ individual accounts driving most of the referrals.

“A lot of us think that the best app for sports is actually Twitter. That’s where the main conversation is happening on a day-to-day basis in real time. That’s probably where you go for conversation when something happens in a really interesting game,” Cabrera told conference attendees.

“And what’s happening now is that with the visibility dips that we’re seeing, a lot of reporters are coming to me in Slack and saying, ‘What do I need to do differently to really make my journalism more visible as a whole?’”

The team now plans a day in advance with writers for a stronger social approach on key stories. A social producer attends news meetings and identifies the top three to five stories for the following day, and then works with reporters to “pull out nuggets that make the most sense for social sharing,” Cabrera said.

“What’s really important about this process is what reporters think is interesting is very different from what the real world is going to think is interesting.”

They thread these social posts with templated custom graphics to make them more engaging.

The Athletic’s fully remote newsroom has also undergone intensive video training over the past three months so they can create instant reactions to major moments in sports, he said.

“In the last three months, we’ve actually trained between 75 to 100 reporters and editors across sports on how to use video,” he said. Every week, they publish 100-150 videos, comprising enterprise podcasts, explainers, reporter-led content, and highlights. 

“Every writer and editor met (remotely) with a producer once a week in small groups and were required to produce at least one video on their beat. It all started with a really simple exercise: recording themselves speaking directly to the camera. 

“We then guided them on the best phone settings and also techniques to make their video look much more professional. And after that is when we began really training them on adding captions, cutting and combining clips, shooting B-roll, and so much more. And after several weeks of them practicing, we provided feedback and we basically said, ‘All right, we feel like you’re ready to go.’" 

The three aspects that matter with reporter video: a key takeaway, speed, and brevity.

Cabrera does not want to turn their reporters into creators, he said.

Instead, “we really think it’s much better for us to partner with creators that fall alongside the same line of journalism or just kind of the branding that we do … . We wanted to have a creator programme that allowed us to have a runway for our journalism and say, ‘If we have this big feature that we’re working on for the next two weeks, how can we bring a creator in to actually be able to do the video companion of this?’”

The Athletic is also keen on building communities. Their reporters do Ask Me Anything sessions on Reddit, with gift links to content, and connect with readers on WhatsApp, where the brand runs the biggest Manchester United and F1 channels. 

“Our reporters are in those WhatsApp channels, answering questions consistently from the user base that are in there. Our goal on WhatsApp is not necessarily to drive you back. Our goal is to keep you there and develop a relationship with you there.”

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