There's nothing wrong with this. We want stories, not facts or
intellectual perceptions.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
*From:* Ray Harrell <mailto:[email protected]>
*To:* 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION'
<mailto:[email protected]>
*Sent:* Friday, July 13, 2012 12:43 AM
*Subject:* Re: [Futurework] Automating journalism
First the artists scream and their profession is destroyed. Now
it's gotten to the rest.
REH
*From:*[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
[mailto:[email protected]] *On Behalf Of
*Arthur Cordell
*Sent:* Thursday, July 12, 2012 8:41 PM
*To:* 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'
*Subject:* Re: [Futurework] Automating journalism
And one more job lost, one less journalism grad hired.
*From:*[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
[mailto:[email protected]] *On Behalf Of *D & N
*Sent:* Thursday, July 12, 2012 8:09 PM
*To:* RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION
*Subject:* Re: [Futurework] Automating journalism
Great! Newspeak! Play that word any way you want to. One small
step for news media. One giant step for propaganda.
D.
On 12/07/2012 4:54 PM, Arthur Cordell wrote:
New reporter? Call him Al, for algorithm
* /by/ Rob Lever
*The new reporter on the US media scene takes no coffee
breaks, churns out articles at lightning speed, and has no
pension plan.*
*That's because the reporter is not a person, but a computer
algorithm, honed to translate raw data such as corporate
earnings reports and previews or sports statistics into
readable prose.*
Algorithms are producing a growing number of articles for
newspapers and websites, such as this one produced by
Narrative Science:
"Wall Street is high on Wells Fargo, expecting it to report
earnings that are up 15.7 percent from a year ago when it
reports its second quarter earnings on Friday, July 13, 2012,"
said the article on Forbes.com.
While computers cannot parse the subtleties of each story,
they can take vast amounts of raw data and turn it into what
passes for news, analysts say.
"This can work for anything that is basic and formulaic," says
Ken Doctor, an analyst with the media research firm Outsell.
*And with media companies under intense financial pressure,
the move to automate some news production "does speak directly
to the rebuilding of the cost economics of journalism," said
Doctor*.
Stephen Doig, a journalism professor at Arizona State
University who has used computer systems to sift through data
which is then provided to reporters, said the new
computer-generated writing is a logical next step.
"I don't have a philosophical objection to that kind of
writing being outsourced to a computer, if the reporter who
would have been writing it could use the time for something
more interesting," Doig said.
*Scott Frederick, chief operating officer of Automated
Insights, another firm in the sector, said he sees this as
"the next generation of content creation."*
The company got its start in 2007 as StatSheet, which
generates news stories from raw feeds of play-by-play data
from major sports events.
The company generates advertising on its own website and is
now beginning to sell its services to other organizations for
sports and real estate news.
*"Over the next 12 to 24 months, every media property will
need some automation strategy," Frederick told AFP.*
*To mimic the effect of the hometown newspaper, the company
generates articles with a different "tonality" depending on
the reader's preference or location*.
For the 2012 Super Bowl, the article for New York Giants' fans
read like this: "Hakeem Nicks had a big night, paving the way
to a victory for the Giants over the Patriots, 21-17 in
Indianapolis. With the victory, New York is the champion of
Super Bowl XLVI."
For New England fans, the story was different: "Behind an
average day from Tom Brady, the Patriots lost to the Giants,
21-17 at home. With the loss, New England falls short of a
Super Bowl ring."
"Data becomes the seeds of the content trees. When you can
create an entire story out of raw data, that is
technologically impressive," Frederick said.
Kristian Hammond, chief technology officer at Chicago-based
Narrative Science, said he had been involved in computer
content generation for more than a decade.
Hammond is on leave from Northwestern University, where he was
on the computer science faculty and headed a joint project
generating content with the university's journalism school.
The company formed in 2010 has 40 clients including Forbes,
and some corporate clients which use the technology to take
spreadsheets or other data for internal reports that are more
readable.
"We're about two-thirds engineering and one-third journalism,"
he said.
*"We knew there were places in traditional journalism where
raw data was used as the driver for telling stories, and we
wanted to take that model and turn it into something a machine
can do," he told AFP.*
*While some articles are reviewed by editors, others are
automatically delivered without human intervention because of
client preference or because the task is too voluminous:
Narrative Science, he said, produced stories on 370,000 Little
League baseball games in the past year.*
The computers cannot pick up on certain things, such as if an
injury or weather affects the game.
"If it's not in the data, we can't say anything about it.
We're very aware of that, but more of what goes on is
data-driven," Hammond said.
"The feedback has been very positive. We haven't done anything
goofy or embarrassing so far."
One goof came from a company called Journatic, a partner of
the Chicago Tribune, which uses a combination of human editors
in the US and overseas and computer algorithms to generated
"hyperlocal" news.
*Some news organizations complained when they discovered the
"bylines" generated were made-up names, not real journalists,
in the Tribune, Houston Chronicle and San Francisco Chronicle,
a violation of ethics policies for the dailies.*
Journatic chief executive Brian Timpone said the flap stemmed
from a misunderstanding with news clients and the fact that
bylines were needed to be seen on Google News.
"We're taking them off," Timpone said, arguing that should not
distract attention from the business model which can help
media companies.
"The way news is produced has not changed in 50 years," he
told AFP.
Timpone said his company can produce news more efficiently
"with technology, lots of local news gathering, and a
distributed writing team."
"It's not about algorithms. Algorithms only work if the data
is structured. There's no way to automate everything."
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/reporter-call-him-al-algorithm-190751150.html
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