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SoylentNews is people

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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:26PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:26PM (#231755)

    Hang on a moment... these automation things... what data do they operate on?

    • Either is is the product of the journalist's job, namely gather, interpret and present the news, in which case this saves zero work because the journalist still has to generate the data (barring 'editing for the newsroom' which is a minor and menial task).

    OR

    • Journalists and news organizations just plain suck and copy-paste from the equivalent of RSS feeds that are provided to them by the current Powers That Be (Gov, Congress Critters, Corps...) and don't do anything themselves.

    So what is it, journalists... Are you doing your job or not?

  • (Score: 1) by cyxs on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:42PM

    by cyxs (124) on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:42PM (#231771)

    When have we really seen journalists asking questions or questioning the facts in cases recently? The current crop of the big named news groups takes things at what people say without any real background then take what they says to a panel of "experts" on this subject. Its very laughable with what is happening in the world. Very little is questioned by "journalists" unless its "trending" on social media.

    Look at how many recent "police reports" have been proven false yet nothing is done about them or questions asked unless lawsuits are filed. So these data sources are completely unreliable as news data sources.

    We need real reporting and questions asked by journalists not these softball questions they approve of before they are asked.

    So both of your options are one and the same as they don't ask questions as is and only spoon feed the answers and questions the company/government/cops want.