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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?
(Score: 1) by meustrus on Friday September 04 2015, @03:31AM
Can automating reporting lead the way back to fact-based news?
And what does that mean? Don't we have enough of that crap on the old TV? A growing segment of the population is getting its news purely from social media and it's definitely not because of any preference for "facts" or "objectivity". It's because people actually really like to see an obvious point of view. Some slant. Some touch of humanity. Nobody wants the lie of total objectivity. People want to know what they're dealing with. Of course most of the time they prefer to deal with someone they agree with. But as long as they at least understand the angle it makes sense. They can relate. We can relate. Facts will be the death of the news.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday September 04 2015, @02:11PM
There two types of people who get their news from social media. A lot of people certainly do it for the echo chamber, but those are the same people who watch only cable news. Or do you somehow think Fox or MSNBC aren't echo chambers? But there's also a lot of people who get their news from social media to *escape* that. You can get the same story from the single-issue pages (anything from 'Cop Block' to the 'Linux' group), you'll get international perspectives (RT, AJE, BBC, etc), you can get the official government line from sources like CNN or the NYT or even the government pages themselves, and sometimes you can get direct witness accounts. And those will all appear together around the same time. None of those sources will tell the whole story alone, but if you put all of them together and keep each one's bias in mind you can get a pretty good idea of the truth.