Dr. José Luis Rojas Torrijos
Associate Professor, Department of Journalism II, Universidad de Sevilla, Spain. His research focuses on sports journalism, ethics and stylebooks.
Email: jlrojas@us.es
Twitter: @rojastorrijos
To address the decline in web traffic caused by the disruption of generative AI search engines, news organizations have been forced to rethink their editorial strategies across the platforms and channels on which they operate. Several studies show that Google AI Overviews have led fewer users to click through to read the content behind news stories, as the automatically generated summaries provided by search engines are often sufficient for their needs.
In the era of algorithms, where clickbait and page-view volume seem to lose relevance, news organizations are increasingly investing in journalistic content that cannot easily be summarized or replicated by AI, either because it is extremely recent or, more importantly, because it is unique and authentic. Such content includes local coverage, scoops, investigative journalism, first-person on-the-ground reporting, and breaking news.
As part of this necessary editorial shift, legacy media brands have strengthened their production of email newsletters, an old medium that has transformed into a core publishing strategy, a curated product delivered on a person’s inbox without interference from AI-powered algorithms, social media noise and non-stop push notifications. These newsletters, which allow news publishers to strengthen ties with their audiences and build communities around them, have proliferated to delve into highly specialized and niche content, such sports.
Newsletters emerged again during the 2026 men’s FIFA World Cup as an opportunity for sports media outlets to create added value to their coverage by providing exclusive insights, curiosities and behind-the-scenes of the tournament reflecting the personal perspective either of a special correspondent at the event or a prominent journalist in the newsroom specialized in international football.
In this case, email turns out to be the place where fans/subscribers receive and expect to find more information from those personal brands they know and trust, and also some extra content about the mega-event they are already hooked on—and about which they need to know more—so they can enjoy it up when watching the matches live.
Most major sports media outlets and the sports sections of general-interest media sent out a free-subscription newsletter during the nearly forty days of competition. These email publications were used by sports media outlets not only to highlight and redistribute their own reports, analyses, and features by their special correspondents—already available on their websites—but also to curate original data, tips and updates thereby creating a unique, distinctive product within the platform.
The Athletic, for instance, launched ‘The World Cup Briefing’, a new daily pop-up which was added to their flagship soccer newsletter, ‘The Athletic FC’. This newsletter, self-defined as “a quick rundown of updates and insights for every fan”, was part of a broad strategy to develop a multiplatform coverage in which dozens of journalists participated to take readers inside the action. The world’s largest sports newsroom showed its own editorial muscle having reporters inside the stadium for each of the 104 matches of the tournament.
The Athletic’s World Cup newsletter demonstrated a clear strategy for engaging football fans through a combination of daily match recaps, data-driven analysis, and explanatory graphics that identified the key factors influencing each game. It also presented tournament predictions from experts and reporters associated with different teams, offering a more pluralistic and impartial overview of the competition. Furthermore, the newsletter fostered audience engagement through interactive features such as polls and prediction games centred on upcoming matches.
Reporting beyond the pitch
Geopolitical storylines inevitably intersected with this World Cup and took center stage, demonstrating once again how sports journalism is not confined solely to match recaps any more.
These issues around the ‘beautiful game’ played a central role in ‘The World Behind’ the Cup, a newsletter that The Guardian dedicated to World Cup history which ran for eight issues before the tournament began. This publication, led by the football writer Jonathan Wilson, served to provide sufficient broad context for the mega-event and to offer the reader key insights for better understanding the participating national teams.
Another newsletter that broadened the thematic scope of the sporting event was ‘Reuters Inside Track’, an email product delivered three times a week. Edited by the sports correspondent Aadi Nair, Reuters highlighted stories from the stadiums but also around them, such as business impact and environmental sustainability controversies around the sporting event. Apart from results, previews and analysis, the newsletter was enhanced by the use of Reuters’ own photo service and some outstanding data visualizations from their graphics department.
‘Mundial 2026’ newsletter launched by El País exemplified the most typical structure of an email publication on a mega-event: welcome commentary section, main stories the day before, feature opinion pieces, agenda outlook and the display of some collaborative windows for the community of readers to share their memories and experiences about FIFA World Cup.
At the same time, newsletters helped bring journalists a little closer to their readers, showing them not only how and why they took some editorial decisions, but also letting them know what it was like in the newsroom during the competition’s most thrilling moments. That is how El País described their feelings the day after Spain became men’s football world champions for the second time.
