Robo-journalism is often hyped as a threat to journalists’ jobs. Schwencke doesn’t see it that way. “The way we use it, it’s supplemental. 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. The way I see it is, it doesn’t eliminate anybody’s job as much as it makes everybody’s job more interesting.”
Having spent some years as a local news reporter, I can attest that slapping together brief, factual accounts of things like homicides, earthquakes, and fires is essentially a game of Mad Libs that might as well be done by a machine. If nothing else, a bot seems likely to save beleaguered scribes from scouring the thesaurus for synonyms for “blaze.” (Lacking an ego, Quakebot does not concern itself with elegant variation.) And in the case of earthquakes, an algorithm may actually be better at judging the newsworthiness of a particular small quake than your average gumshoe reporter or editor. Quakebot knows, for instance, that a magnitude less than 3.0 means it’s probably not worth freaking out about, a lesson that over-eager wire reporters don't always grasp.
At the same time, Quakebot neatly illustrates the present limitations of automated journalism. It can’t assess the damage on the ground, can’t interview experts, and can’t discern the relative newsworthiness of various aspects of the story. Schwencke notes that it sometimes generates a report based on a false alert or glitch in the USGS system. (Like many of its human counterparts, Quakebot doesn’t double-check its facts before publishing.)
- More Here
Having spent some years as a local news reporter, I can attest that slapping together brief, factual accounts of things like homicides, earthquakes, and fires is essentially a game of Mad Libs that might as well be done by a machine. If nothing else, a bot seems likely to save beleaguered scribes from scouring the thesaurus for synonyms for “blaze.” (Lacking an ego, Quakebot does not concern itself with elegant variation.) And in the case of earthquakes, an algorithm may actually be better at judging the newsworthiness of a particular small quake than your average gumshoe reporter or editor. Quakebot knows, for instance, that a magnitude less than 3.0 means it’s probably not worth freaking out about, a lesson that over-eager wire reporters don't always grasp.
At the same time, Quakebot neatly illustrates the present limitations of automated journalism. It can’t assess the damage on the ground, can’t interview experts, and can’t discern the relative newsworthiness of various aspects of the story. Schwencke notes that it sometimes generates a report based on a false alert or glitch in the USGS system. (Like many of its human counterparts, Quakebot doesn’t double-check its facts before publishing.)
- More Here
No comments:
Post a Comment