The Rise of Machine-Written Journalism

Hugh Pickens writes "Peter Kirwan has an interesting article in Wired UK on the emergence of software that automates the collection, evaluation, and even reporting of news events. Thomson Reuters, the world's largest news agency, has started moving down this path, courtesy of an intriguing product with the nondescript name NewsScope, a machine-readable news service designed for financial institutions that make their money from automated, event-driven trading. The latest iteration of NewsScope 'scans and automatically extracts critical pieces of information' from US corporate press releases, eliminating the 'manual processes' that have traditionally kept so many financial journalists in gainful employment. At Northwestern University, a group of computer science and journalism students have developed a program called Stats Monkey that uses statistical data to generate news reports on baseball games. Stats Monkey identifies the players who change the course of games, alongside specific turning points in the action. The rest of the process involves on-the-fly assembly of templated 'narrative arcs' to describe the action in a format recognizable as a news story. 'No doubt Kurt Cagle, editor of XMLToday.org, was engaging in a bit of provocation when he recently suggested that an intelligent agent might win a Pulitzer Prize by 2030,' writes Kirwin. 'Of course, it won't be the software that takes home the prize: it'll be the programmers who wrote the code in the first place, something that Joseph Pultizer could never have anticipated.'"

Comments

The reporter is now a touch more obsolete

[onyxruby]

News agencies have already been turned into commodities, they just don't realize it yet. Now the reporter is being sent down that same drain. With original reporting set to become a 'premium' by the news agencies, their market is only shrinking.

Where were the reporters when millions of jobs were outsourced by H1B's or sent overseas? At best most stories were brief, with no follow up, and no outrage at the loss of middle class America. The same thing has happened in Europe and elsewhere as well.

Now the reporter faces the inevitable market forces that they previously ignored, and they expect anyone left to care? The programs will only get better, the markets and stories it applies to will only improve, and for the vast majority of stories the quality will be imperceivable to the average person.

Re:nonsense

[cgenman]

This strikes me as the sort of thing that, without excessive amounts of variation, would get filtered out quickly by the general public. Sure, a machine can write *one* story on a baseball game that is interesting to read. But after the hundredth version of the same story that you've read, the public would stop reading the text entirely and just filter for the important bits. At that point, you might as well just have a table with the interesting stats.

The challenge isn't to write one story. It's to create a machine that can write N stories that remain interesting and fresh, and with less effort and cost than it would take journalists to just write N stories the traditional way.

Re:Mod parent up.

[lgw]

The purpose of stocks is for a company to raise capital by selling shares to the public, in return for some promise of potential future dividends.

The fact that people trade, hold, or speculate on these stocks in the secondary market (all the busy noise that is the "stock market") is nearly irrelevent. A company should have no reason to care about the price of its stock. Sadly, due to double-taxation of dividends, this has gone completely to shit. People who aren't speculating buy stock not for dividends, but to trade it to the next guy at a profit, because this is tax-favorable over dividends.

Companies do all sorts of crazy BS because of the expectation of stockholders to be rewarded not with dividends (a system that you simply can't game for long) but with rising stock prices (a system that is almost entirely gamesmanship).

Individual investors have the absolute right to seek short term gains or long term gains a their preference. The government has no business meddling in that preference. The "problem with the current market" is that it is no longer grounded in the reality of being able to pay dividends, because some previous generation's ideas about social engineering through taxation punishes dividends as the means of earning a profit on one's investment.