These are not good times for sports journalism. Two recent stories illustrate the challenge.

First, two weeks ago, Fox Sports reporter Charissa Thompson admitted in a podcast interview that, when she worked as a sideline reporter at ESPN — the cable network that proclaims itself the “Worldwide Leader in Sports” — she sometimes made up reports:

“I’ve said this before, so I haven’t been fired for saying it, but I’ll say it again,” Thompson said. “I would make up the report sometimes because, A, the coach wouldn’t come out at halftime or it was too late and I was like, I didn’t want to screw up the report, so I was like, ‘I’m just gonna make this up.'”

Then, Futurist broke a story that Sports Illustrated, once the gold standard of sports-magazine journalism, has been publishing articles written by artificial intelligence, bylined to reporters (complete with web profiles and headshots) who do not even exist:

According to a second person involved in the creation of the Sports Illustrated content who also asked to be kept anonymous, that’s because it’s not just the authors’ headshots that are AI-generated. At least some of the articles themselves, they said, were churned out using AI as well. “The content is absolutely AI-generated,” the second source said, “no matter how much they say that it’s not.”

The Thompson story kicked up a fury among sports reporters in general and sideline reporters in particular, with some apparently angrier at Thompson’s public confession than at the underlying conduct. The SI writers union loudly protested the replacement of unionized jobs with machines.

The dishonesty is attributable to the perpetrators. But these are symptoms. The industry itself has grave problems.

Sports journalism has been under immense and accelerating pressure for two decades. The decline of local newspapers (driven heavily by the loss of classified advertising) and the assumption of a generation of consumers that they can get their news for free over the internet has decimated (and then some) newsrooms across the country, and sports desks have been hit as hard as anyone. There are fewer and fewer entry-level jobs at which young people can cut their teeth as reporters in order to work their way up to the few columnist jobs that pay reasonably well and involve something other than just writing who-what-when-where stories.

The reality is that a huge amount of what gets written in sports is mind-numbing and barely worth reading, and always has been. People who just want to know what happened in a game have innumerable ways to find out now. A robot could tell you — and now, it will. Much of what gets reported in sports outside the games and is actually newsworthy can be handled in a few lines: So-and-so is out with a hamstring pull, expected back in four to six weeks. Lots of TV coverage is just filler. Many sideline reporters work really hard and occasionally break real news, but the dirty secret of jobs like Thompson’s is that they’re expected to deliver a lot of reports that are of no substance and no interest to anybody. It’s not a coincidence that TV networks tend to staff these jobs with attractive young women, in the dual hopes of getting male eyeballs and demonstrating that their workplaces aren’t all-male. But they are given a thankless and frequently pointless job.

The internet, meanwhile, has produced a high volume of sharp sports commentary and even occasionally reporting, much of it for free. In the decade from 2000-2010 when my writing on the web was heavily focused on baseball, I often wrote for free, and regularly made less than $100 a month. It was a labor of love, but I was competing for eyeballs with people who did it for a living. There were many of us.

There remains a huge demand for sports telecasts, and for sports news. As the great baseball writer Bill James was fond of saying, if the business of baseball died, but the interest in the sport remained, new business structures would arise; but if the sporting interest died, the business would die no matter what it did. People still care a great deal to watch the games; to get the data, such as box scores and statistics and injury and transaction reports; and to get smart analysis of the sports and teams they follow. They care about betting on games and fantasy teams and tournament pools. They still enjoy well-written, long-form features giving a human look at their favorite stars and offbeat characters. And sports stars are part of the broader culture, as we’ve seen with the surge of interest in Travis Kelce and the Kansas City Chiefs — hardly an obscure player or franchise previously — since Kelce began dating pop star Taylor Swift.

But the number of journalists needed to feed that interest with either live broadcasts, good feature writing, or smart analysis is far smaller than the number traditionally employed in the industry. Much of what it produces is dross. And the sports consumer market has repeatedly rebelled at efforts to substitute political commentary for the stuff that people actually come to sports to see and read. There will doubtless be many more months as grim as November 2023 for sports journalism until it aligns with what the market will now bear.