We’re in a transition time for news media. Online media is growing, printed forms are fading. Within the online space distinctions between newspapers and blogs are blurring, and fundamental issues of the balance between pay-walled vs free media remain to be decided. Media is going to look very different in 20 years time!
One of the less remarked aspects of this process is that not all of the decisions are going to be made by people. In fact of course that is already the case. Machines – programs, algorithms – are already in the loop. Handy sites like Google News are collating and ranking news stories already, almost certainly using algorithms similar to the page rank algorithms that they use to rank web pages. But we’re in the process of moving beyond this, to news that is abstracted, and almost certainly soon “written” by machine:
The Rise of Machine-Written Journalism
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. …
This raises more interesting questions than I know what to do with. Who will write these news collecting and authoring programs? What biases will be built in to them? Gaming page rank is already big business, how long before gaming news rank is the next political battlefield? Who is legally responsible for an automated news item (and its consequences)? As we turn over news and voting systems to programs and programmers are we ensuring that the geek shall inherit the earth? Hmmmm. Well, one thing I’m confident of, The Standard will always be written by flesh and red-blooded humans. Make that – fairly confident – I guess Lynn could always decide that robots were a lot less trouble than writers…
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