About This Magazine

What this is

The Sporting Chronicles is a weekly magazine about American sport, published more than a hundred years later. Each issue covers the week before its date, as a sports weekly of the time would have: baseball, boxing, horse racing, football, golf, tennis and any other sport that made news.

Each issue includes only what was public when it went to press, at about 11 p.m. on the Sunday before its date. It says nothing about what happened later, and stories that were unsettled then are left unsettled.

What is real and what is invented

The events, the people, the scores and the figures are real. They come from the newspapers of the week, the racing papers and the official records, and from modern histories where those are a better guide to what the papers printed.

When the newspapers of the day gave different accounts of the same thing, we do not quietly or strategically choose one. We print both. We quote someone directly only when the wording has been checked against an image of the printed page; otherwise we give the gist in our own words.

Two things are invented. The ads imitate the style of the period: the companies are invented, but the prices are true to the time. The cover of each issue is original art made with AI, in the style of the period. It shows no real person and nothing that happened after the issue went to press.

Who writes it

The Sporting Chronicles is published by Jeremy Heckerling. It is written by AI, to rules the publisher set. Every fact is traced to a source before it is printed. Each issue is then fact-checked twice: first by the AI that wrote it, then by a second AI from a different company.

Whose voice it is

The magazine is written in the voice of the mainstream sporting press of 1919, and that press was white. It covered the major leagues, the colleges and the white prizefighters closely. It covered Black athletes rarely and badly, and often in terms we will not repeat.

In 1919 only Black writers, in the Black press, covered Black sport with respect. So whenever Black sport makes news, whether a ball club, a boxer, a college team or a player on a professional team, we report it in the voice of those writers. That is a conceit — there was no multi-racial sports press of the day.

Elsewhere the AI imitates the style and slang of the white sportswriters of the day. In these items it imitates the different style and slang of the Black writers who covered Black athletes. The issues don't flag the switch. This page explains it.

The facts in those items follow the same rules as everything else; only the voice changes. The alternative was to replicate the silence of the white press of 1919.

A word from the publisher

I set up the AI that writes this magazine to print the facts as they could have been known when each issue went to press, and I built in checks, including an independent fact-check, to catch mistakes. I hope you enjoy living through this era of sport.

But I am not a sports historian, and these issues are not reviewed by sports historians. The magazine is for enjoyment, not a work of reference. I read each issue as it comes out, the same as any other reader.

If you enjoy this, you might also enjoy The New America Times: the news of the world, 250 years to the day.