Journalism Beyond Human Limitations
The term automated journalism, often referred to as robot journalism, conjures up images of fearsome androids equipped with processing ability far beyond human competence and possessing a writing style more economical than Ernest Hemingway who are coming to take over newsrooms and render human journalists redundant. This is true to a certain extent.
If a journalist only does basic stories which merely recount facts, they will probably be replaced by automated journalism. Associated Press’ (AP) former Assistant Business Editor Philana Patterson, who has worked as a business reporter and as a producer at Bloomberg, trained the natural language generation platform ‘Wordsmith’ used by the AP and developed by Automated Insights, on how to write earnings reports. Along with some of her colleagues, Patterson provided Automated Insights with a variety of story-lines to draw from when converting raw earnings reports data into stories.
As Patterson puts it “I’ve written thousands of earnings stories, and I’ve edited even more, I’m very familiar with earnings.” Wordsmith has produced more articles than Patterson has in her entire career in just one year.
Automated journalism relies on using software or algorithms to generate stories without the aid of a human. The algorithm uses structured source data to produce stories, and as such it works best for routine stories in domains where accurate and clean data is regularly available, e.g. Sports or Finance. It cannot be used for domains where there is no data available, yet.
Automated articles can be produced in a matter of seconds by the various algorithms employed by news organisations after data becomes available, examples of this include the results of sports matches, the release of quarterly figures and earthquake monitoring systems.
Automated Insights claims that its technology is able to produce 500 articles per second these articles are personalised match reports written for Yahoo’s Fantasy Football users, it is also an example of how automated journalism can create news for a specific audience.
Human journalists simply cannot compete with the efficiency and speed with which algorithms disseminate news.
The quality of the article is heavily dependent on the source data used by the algorithm. If the source is data flawed it can lead to erroneous articles, the same applies to the actual coding of the algorithm itself. Legally algorithms cannot be held liable for any mistakes but that does not mean that news organisations can shrug off trespasses simply as computing errors, liability lies with a natural person, i.e. the publisher or person who fed code to the software, in controversial cases news organisations may be compelled to be transparent and reveal its source code or provide details as to how the story was generated.
One of the main criticisms of automated journalism in news writing is that its readability leaves a lot to be desired, readers find it dry and boring in comparison to human journalism, in contrast, readers feel that automated journalism is more credible and accurate than traditional news articles. The technology is relatively new and the concern about the lacklustre copy produced by automated journalism is likely to be addressed through further development, as natural language generation technology improves, so will the quality of the text.
Automated journalism will be in newsrooms for the foreseeable future and for the time being it poses very little threat to the human jobs in the newsroom. There are still journalistic skills that are beyond the capacity of algorithms, therefore journalists are encouraged to hone their craft in areas such as in-depth analysis, interviewing skills and investigative reporting. Journalists also hold the upper hand because they can ask questions, explain what the data means and place news in context.
Automated journalism may even serve to enhance the quality of human journalism if certain parts of a story are routine enough to be automated it frees up time for the journalist to focus on the more important journalistic skills mentioned above.
This integration of human and automated journalism has been coined the ‘man-machine marriage’, so it seems that in the future the newsroom will not be run by androids but by cyborg journalists instead.
