Regarding the URL handling, I also used to hate it, but wrote a tool to make it easier to deal with; details are here if you're interested (despite the title, the relevant tool is not Vim-only): <http://tadhg.com/wp/2012/10/07/tools-for-writing-restructure...;
Technical considerations aside, I think a key question here is whether readers expect just-the-facts stats-based reporting of what happened in the game, or a narrative constructed from the game.
If it's the former, then "sportswriting" about any given game is really just another data delivery/presentation format and should be automated (that, or readers should gravitate towards more efficient data formats, like box scores).
If it's the latter, then a writing program will have to fake creating a narrative, which sounds like a much more difficult job to do. Local sportswriters often know the players, making it far easier to construct narratives around the personalities involved in the games.
My guess is that readers want the latter, but perhaps not enough to pay more, so techniques like those employed by Narrative Science will probably become increasingly common.
Personally, I think the best place for this is in business writing, because I think that eliminating "narratives" from reporting market movements would lead to far more accurate articles.
> You should never put anything on the internet that you don't want others to see. You shouldn't talk about things online that you dont want others to hear
I understand the practical aspect of this advice, but is this either realistic or fair? People will always have things they wish to communicate to only select subsets of other people--why should they give that up when they're online?
Permanent digital records of this kind of communication is a new thing, and while you're right that many people act naively about it despite warnings, it's also true that socially we haven't figured out how to handle any of this, and many of the complaints about Facebook are important expressions of how people think it /should/ be handled.
https://github.com/erisian/rest_tools
http://tadhg.com/wp/2012/10/07/tools-for-writing-restructure...