REAL LIFE IMITATES FED: LA TIMES NEWSDROID
by Hazed
When the Los Angeles Times published a story about an earthquake on Monday, it was ground-breaking in more than one way: it was the first story about the quake to show up online, and it was written and published without the intervention of a human.
Yes, it was the first story to be created by a newsdroid in real life.
The newsdroid was actually an algorithm, written by a journalist and programmer, which was designed to automatically generate a short article whenever an earthquake occurred. The story appeared online just three minutes after the quake was detected. You can read the article at the source link below.
The technology, the brainchild of Ken Schwencke, draws on trusted sources such as the US Geological Survey. It takes data and puts it into a pre-written template.
The newsdroid technology doesn’t just monitor earthquakes. Another algorithm generates stories about the city’s crime, which human editors then look at before deciding which to publish.
Other news organisations are experimenting with algorithm-based reporting in areas such as sports.
If you’re a real life journalist, don’t worry that you are going to be replaced by a newsdroid soon. Mr Schwencke says that these algorithm-generated stories don’t take the place of journalists, but instead they allow available data to be gathered and disseminated quickly. “It saves people a lot of time, and for certain types of stories, it gets the information out there in usually about as good a way as anybody else would,” he explained. “The way I see it is, it doesn’t eliminate anybody’s job as much as it makes everybody’s job more interesting.”
Not quite a newsdroid as we have in the Fed2 Star office, but a step in that direction, certainly.
