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, Redundant) by opinionated_science on Thursday September 03 2015, @01:56PM
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....
(Score: 1, Redundant) by Francis on Thursday September 03 2015, @04:41PM
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
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday September 03 2015, @09:28PM
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
(Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday September 03 2015, @07:36PM
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
Not at all. But people come here for the discussion just as much as the news.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:10PM
Stop tacking on inane questions at the end.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:26PM
Hang on a moment... these automation things... what data do they operate on?
OR
So what is it, journalists... Are you doing your job or not?
(Score: 1) by cyxs on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:42PM
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.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by richtopia on Thursday September 03 2015, @03:12PM
There, I already automated headlines. Content should be pretty easy too.
(Score: 2) by nukkel on Thursday September 03 2015, @07:35PM
This article brought to you by sn.exe
(Score: 4, Funny) by dbe on Thursday September 03 2015, @09:19PM
So we had this journalist article about no math needed to be a programmer and now we discover that we don't even need a journalist to report news?
The question becomes, who's writing the journalist emulator program?
Hopefully no math needed...
-dbe
(Score: 1) by unzombied on Thursday September 03 2015, @10:54PM
Write about things you know, nuanced to fit topic and reader. Or scrape press releases and automatically translate them into a custom algorithm template, with the main benefit of reducing staff and costs.
No new questions are raised, only research into techniques for lowering readers' standards for "news." Leading to lost readers who switch to specialty forums that have found techniques for resisting automated spambots and astroturfers.
How does this "lead the way back to fact-based news?" I have no idea. Further, that sounds like a non sequiter or an attempt to frame the issue. Something a biased algorithm could do.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Friday September 04 2015, @12:07AM
That explains why every site's news articles look 80% copy-pasted from some other site. What happened to original reporting?
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @02:30AM
I remember thinking as a boy when CNN started out. "where are they going to find that much news to fill 24/7". Oh they did alright. With hours and hours of commercials and opinion puff pieces.
(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.
(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]