This is the second week of my sports writing and reporting class at SUNY Oswego.

As always, that means this the week for game stories. I have my students write a Super Bowl game story in 55 minutes to give them a little taste of deadline pressure. We also walk through the basics of the inverted pyramid and how to write the basic AP-style gamer.

I’ve been a long believer in this. I view game stories to be the journalistic equivalent of scales. Before you can run a marathon, you’ve got to be able to walk a block down the street. Before you can think about writing like Wright Thompson or reporting like Woj, you’ve got to be able to start with the most basic AP-style inverted pyramid story.

As an example, I have the students read an AP game story on a random men’s college basketball recap. This year’s recap was from North Florida’s 10-point victory over North Alabama from the end of January.

But as I was getting the readings ready for my class, I saw this tagline on the story:

This was generated by Automated Insights, http://www.automatedinsights.com/ap, using data from STATS LLC, https://www.stats.com

This recap wasn’t written by a person. It was written by a computer program.

This is not new, of course. The AP has been doing this since 2018 now, using Wordsmith an AI-like program to generate these basic recaps. The idea is to free reporters to do more analytical, feature type stories rather than using their time on standard recaps.

But this drove home a question I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

Is it worth teaching my students how to write a basic game story?

I really do believe in the theory behind it, and I think that any and all practice is important for students who are being introduced to the craft.

But is it worth it to spend time teaching them to do something that a computer program can do?