How the Sports tab is made
10 sources feed this tab, 9 of them answering at the last check. All of them are public feeds the publishers offer themselves.
Sources
- AP Sports: a Google News search for site:apnews.com (NFL OR NBA OR MLB OR NHL OR "college football" OR soccer OR golf OR tennis) when:1d
- BBC Sport
- CBS Sports
- Defector
- ESPN
- ESPN: a Google News search for site:espn.com when:1d
- New York teams: a Google News search for (Yankees OR Mets OR "New York Giants" OR "New York Jets" OR "Buffalo Bills" OR Knicks OR "Brooklyn Nets" OR "New York Rangers" OR Islanders OR "Buffalo Sabres" OR "New York Liberty") when:1d
- NPR
- Sports Illustrated: a Google News search for site:si.com when:1d
- The Guardian
Rules this tab follows
- Every headline links to the publisher. The page shows the headline, a line or two from the publisher's own feed and a small picture when the feed has one. Nothing else is copied.
- The feeds are checked every hour, on the hour. A story drops off 48 hours after it was published.
- Sources are center or left leaning and free to read. Press release wires, sports sites and look-alike towns (the other Albanys and Troys) are blocked.
- No sports, no obituaries, no murders, arrests or crime reports, and nothing about sexual crimes, on any tab.
- Sports is the one tab where the games are allowed: the sports words and sports sites that are muted everywhere else are let through here. The crime rule and the rest still apply.
- Each story is sorted into a kind of sport (football, basketball, baseball, hockey, soccer, golf, tennis, racing, fighting, Olympics and more) from the words in its headline. The buttons at the top of the Sports tab, and the Sports card in Settings, decide which kinds you see.
- Betting picks, odds, promo codes and "how to watch" listings are skipped. Capital Region sports have a tab of their own, 518 Sports.
- The scores strip at the top comes from ESPN's public scoreboard feed, refreshed every 15 minutes: the New York teams (Bills, Giants, Jets, Knicks, Nets, Yankees, Mets, Rangers, Islanders, Sabres, Liberty) and the local colleges (Siena, UAlbany, RPI, Union). High school scores are not on it; there is no reliable public source for Section II results.
- When several outlets carry the same story it shows once, with the others listed under "Also". A story already on an earlier tab (World first, then USA, then 518 News, then the extra tabs) does not repeat on a later one.
- Newest first, with a lift for stories many outlets cover. No single source may take more than 4 spots in a row (2 for magazines and one-person newsletters), so one outlet never crowds the top.
- Stories about Donald Trump are held to about 1 in 10 unless you change that in Settings.
- The admin can remove a story, or add one by hand; a hand-added story sits at the top of its tab for 48 hours. Nothing here is written or rewritten by the site.
What you can change
- How many stories you see (30, 50 or up to 100), how many Trump stories, whether paywalled papers show, pictures on or off, and words that hide a story: all in Settings.
- Text size, compact mode, light or dark, and the order of the boxes on the front page, also in Settings.
- 🔖 Read later under any story keeps it on your own page until you delete it.
- Add Sports to your tab bar in Settings so it is one tap away.
- An account is optional and asks only for a name and a password; it carries your settings, your Read later list and your thumbs up to every device.
The whole picture is on How we get this data. Every source on the site is listed on About and sources.