This past week, Sports Illustrated took down an article on one of its affiliate sites from a writer named Parker Loverich, who was accused of plagiarizing information from Sportico. SI subsequently removed the site, which was focused on prediction markets, from its affiliate program. The incident came less than three years after SI was accused of using AI authors and content under its previous ownership, The Arena Group.
Front Office Sports spoke to SI editor-in-chief Steve Cannella about the affiliate program, which has about 200 satellite sites that operate on the SI.com domain and benefit from its strong search engine positioning while operating separately from the main legacy publication. The interview included questions about whether these sites’ articles are required to be written by people rather than AI, what safeguards SI is taking from a quality-control perspective, and how readers are expected to distinguish affiliate sites from the traditional SI property.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Front Office Sports: As you reflect on this a week or so later with the gambling story that got taken down, what happened?
Steve Cannella: This is one of our On SI sites. As you know, this is a network of sites that are run by independent publishers on our domain, specializing in coverage of specific teams, schools, or niche verticals. And this was one of those sites where a writer, frankly, did some things he should not have. And it was brought to our attention, and we discovered it. We dealt with it. We have a zero tolerance policy for publishers who don’t live up to our editorial guidelines. And when we discovered this, we immediately took steps to remove the content and remove the writer and the publisher of that site.
