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posted by martyb on Thursday September 03 2015, @01:48PM   Printer-friendly
from the can-automation-write-a-report-on-report-automation? dept.

Patterson’s task is becoming increasingly common in newsrooms. Journalists at ProPublica, Forbes, The New York Times, Oregon Public Broadcasting, Yahoo!, and others are using algorithms to help them tell stories about business and sports as well as education, inequality, public safety, and more. For most organizations, automating parts of reporting and publishing efforts is a way to both reduce reporters’ workloads and to take advantage of new data resources. In the process, automation is raising new questions about what it means to encode news judgment in algorithms, how to customize stories to target specific audiences without making ethical missteps, and how to communicate these new efforts to audiences.

Automation is also opening up new opportunities for journalists to do what they do best: tell stories that matter. With new tools for discovering and understanding massive amounts of information, journalists and publishers alike are finding new ways to identify and report important, very human tales embedded in big data.

Can automating reporting lead the way back to fact-based news?


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  • (Score: 2, Redundant) by opinionated_science on Thursday September 03 2015, @01:56PM

    by opinionated_science (4031) on Thursday September 03 2015, @01:56PM (#231733)

    NO!!!!

    But to be serious... Current news media has already been stripped of any details. Partly to save money, but also to stretch stories out since the source of stories is unified.

    As an objective analyst it becomes clear that there are huge holes in the media reporting. The shape of the hole reflect the local politics, commercial interests, dogmatic affiliations etc....

    Good journalism can be recognised by someone writing a story that *explains* the context of facts within a greater pictures. This is beyond many of the current crop of journalists. Not because there are no good journalists, but because the media organisations are businesses and dont want to pay for good writing. They just want to sell ads....

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  • (Score: 1, Redundant) by Francis on Thursday September 03 2015, @04:41PM

    by Francis (5544) on Thursday September 03 2015, @04:41PM (#231845)

    That's problematic, but the bigger issue is that there just isn't 24 hours worth of news out there to be had. At least not without doing a lot of BS stories that most people aren't interested in.

    Back in olden times when there was one or maybe two hours of news coverage on the TV it wasn't as much of a problem. Filling that was relatively easy and much of it could be repeated for different broadcasts. But, with the 24/7 news channels, there's just not that much news during most news cycles, so it requires a lot of filler material like commentary and going into the minutia that people aren't normally interested in.

    • (Score: 2, Redundant) by M. Baranczak on Thursday September 03 2015, @07:12PM

      by M. Baranczak (1673) on Thursday September 03 2015, @07:12PM (#231903)
      You've got it exactly backwards. CNN (just to pick one example) doesn't report 24 hours worth of news. They report 1 hour of news (actually less, since this includes a lot of filler), and repeat it every hour. And if the journalists actually took the time to dig into the stories, instead of just transcribing press releases, there would be a lot more than 24 hours worth.
      • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday September 03 2015, @09:28PM

        by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Thursday September 03 2015, @09:28PM (#231977) Homepage

        Yup, FoxNews does that as well. To elaborate, the "filler" is getting a few people to discuss the news and react emotionally and hysterically with opinion (specifically the agenda of that particular news network) rather than fact. Think Reddit, except that everybody has Downs Syndrome and is speaking live on TV.

        Sometimes there will be a guest with a dissenting voice who is ganged up on by the other 2-3 people and is often made to look either wimpy or a unlikeable caricature even more outrageous than the others.

        My main gripe is what American mainstream news isn't reporting about. The Snowden leaks, for example -- the mainstream stopped reporting them when it was revealed that all NSA data is sent directly to Israel unredacted. Any criticism of Israel is conspicuously absent from both the Right and Left-sided networks.

  • (Score: 1) by kazzie on Thursday September 03 2015, @06:00PM

    by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 03 2015, @06:00PM (#231877)
    Even if they do manage to get news down to "bare fact", the comment feeds below can only aspire to opinionated drivel.
    • (Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday September 03 2015, @07:36PM

      by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 03 2015, @07:36PM (#231918)

      Would you say SN suffers in the same way?

      --
      SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
      • (Score: 1) by kazzie on Friday September 04 2015, @07:55AM

        by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 04 2015, @07:55AM (#232164)

        Not at all. But people come here for the discussion just as much as the news.