Real-time scoring, chats, and the like are a great way to bring fans along for the ride, especially with high school sports, which are mostly untelevised. But it’s far from clear whether professional newsrooms—used to playing it down the middle and diminished by a decade of cutbacks—can deliver this rapid-fire content with the personalized touch that fans want, and do it without missing a beat on the old-fashioned game story. If they can’t, fans on Facebook and hobbyist developers may beat them at their own game.

Jake Batsell , a former Dallas Morning News reporter and videographer, is an assistant professor of journalism at Southern Methodist University.