Sports Genius: Intro & Overview

What is Sports Genius?Sports Genius is a collaborative project that specializes in providing context and commentary on sports content, both on Genius and using the Genius Web Annotator. We annotate anything you can think of in the sports world.

Blending Original Content and the Web AnnotatorLike our friends at News Genius, Sports Genius uses the Genius Web Annotator to advance the future of sports journalism. Imagine a world where breaking news on ESPN is accompanied by annotations from fans and important sports figures! The work we annotate today is merely first base on the sports journalism diamond of tomorrow.

Sports journalism is unique in that there’s room for both critical analysis and fan-driven highlight material. People want to read Grantland quality articles, but they’ll also swipe through their phones every hour for the latest GIF highlights and power rankings. Most Sports Genius annotations will reside in the Web Annotator world, but user-created original content is also featured on the Sports Genius homepage.

What makes a good Sports annotation?We pull our information from a wide variety of credible sources and put them all on one page—specifically, in an annotation box. We combine trivia, GIFs, images, and statistics/analysis all into one annotation; that’s what separates us from the rest of the world.

Our annotations should always enhance their underlying text. Since they’re extra-textual— they are an addition to the text— they should always be relevant, but things can be relevant in a variety of ways: some annotations will be light bulb moments that the reader would never normally have thought of.

This is a good Sports annotation—it argues against the text (voting results) with concrete statistics and a vibrant voice:

Annotations should swing for the fences, not for a groundout to the shortstop. Remember to cite your references and interlink to existing Sports Genius pages whenever possible. Use humor when applicable—we do have personalities, after all. Show readers the amazing things we can do, both on-site and in the wider web. Before you submit an annotation, ask yourself: Would I enjoy reading this? Did I create something new, original, and additive in this annotation? Is it worthy of an upvote?

If the answer to any of those is no, you should step back to the free throw line and take another shot.

RestrictionsRight now, the “Genius.it/” proxy is incompatible with a few major media outlets, including The New York Times, Medium, The New Yorker, and Bloomberg. However, you can still use the Genius Chrome Extension or Bookmarklet to make annotations on those sites and share your marked up versions with other users who has have the extension enabled.

Due to its free-flowing article style, annotating on ESPN is difficult, but not impossible.

Page Level Roles: Page levels roles can be appointed by a Genius staff member. Typically, the only reason you should have a page-level role is when you have a direct connection to that page. Obvious examples include you being the primary author of the text, or the subject of it. Staff members of a particular publication can also have page level roles relevant to their position, e.g. fact checkers and editors.

Verified Annotators: Account verification is done by a Genius staff member. To qualify as a Verified Annotator on Genius and get our green checkie, you should have a Verified Twitter account. If you’re objectively famous and a huge deal, but you’re not verified on Twitter, raise it with a Genius staff member and they’ll make the call on whether or not you should be Verified in our own environment.

Stuff to Avoid• Mean-spirited or unrelated gossip
• Generic information about a story, site, author, or topic mentioned
• Paraphrasing what the text already says, e.g. “This article discusses Chip Kelly’s firing.”
• Fact-less boosterism, e.g. “This is a brilliant point!” Why is it a brilliant point?
• Time-sensitive phrasing that will quickly become inaccurate (“two years ago” etc). Simply identify the date itself.
• Speculation about what the writer or a source is suggesting—better to use evidence, there’s usually good stuff to be had! Better yet, get them to annotate on their own! You can get in touch with the Sports Genius email template.
• Snarking out. Show respect to the piece and don’t annotate half-lines with snarky hot takes; refute whole ideas and sentences with reasoned arguments.

Useful Sports Genius Links• Forum
• Annotated Pages
• Web Annotator Bonus IQ
• Verified Sports Personalities