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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: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday September 04 2015, @03:38PM
to do what they do best:
publish their stories on websites that take ten minutes to load over a T-1 line.
The reason all the traditional print media was only too happy to bend over and take it like a journalist when Facebook, uh... "offered" to publish their stories for them, is that they don't know why their websites don't yield revenue.
Jakob Nielsen's homepage usability: 50 websites deconstructed [powells.com] made plain the reason in 2001 but "Websites" is a New Media concept so journalists don't own any copies.
For some time now I've been puzzling over a way to send dead-tree letters to the publishers and senior editors of every dead-tree newspaper in the land just to suggest they read it.
I have quite a lot of experience in direct mail, I could self-fund the postage by selling them the book but really what I want is for newspapers not to die. I figure more journalists will read Nielsen's work were I to suggest they do so without having anything to gain by mailing that letter other than that I'll have some other way to get my news than Slashdot Media [slashdotmedia.com].
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]