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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