Robo-journalism, who needs humans?

BBC News - Robot writes LA Times earthquake breaking news article: ""Robo-journalism" is increasingly being used in newsrooms worldwide. The LA Times is a pioneer in the technology which draws on trusted sources - such as the US Geological Survey - and places data into a pre-written template. As well as the earthquake report, it also uses another algorithm to generate stories about crime in the city - with human editors deciding which ones need greater attention. Other news organisations have experimented with algorithm-based reporting methods in other areas, particularly sports. The generated story does not replace the journalist, Mr Schwencke argued, but instead allows available data to be quickly gathered and disseminated. "It's supplemental," he told the magazine. "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." (read more at link below)

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The New York Times, Data Scientist, Machine Learning, Boost Subscriptions?

Boost subscriptions? More likely decrease subscription losses --

The New York Times Hires a Chief Data Scientist and Hopes Machine Learning Can Boost Subscriptions | MIT Technology Review: "... Big publishers are also looking to keep pace with media startups, some of which have been hiring Wiggins’s students. Websites such as BuzzFeed, publisher of a mix of silly and serious news, have shown that mathematical modeling can help increase stories’ “virality”—a measure of how widely the content gets shared online. Sites like BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post now get more page views than the New York Times, but with far smaller staffs...."

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Photos Become Ads With New Technology

Interesting read --

Photos Become Ads With New Technology - NYTimes.com: ".... To Mr. Paqvalén, publishers should be able to get a piece of the action since their editorial material is, in many cases, already helping people make purchases on web stores. “In the world we’re in today, the publisher is creating impulses, and e-commerce merchants are capturing the value of these impulses,” he said. With Kiosked, he said, publishers themselves “become the web shops of the future.”"

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The Intercept, Why Call It A Magazine?

Calling new media by old media terms --

The very public growth of The Intercept | Capital New York:“...You're creating magazines that have a following and have a voice, that's really going to help you with your business,” Bates said. “These magazines will have very unique approaches and to that extent you might see an individual mix of the business models for each one. We've started having conversations about what it will look like or are there subscriber opportunities. But we haven't begun to have those conversations in any detail.” There’s one other question that has given professional media ponderers grist in the last few days: Why call it a “magazine”? "I'm surprised by the question and surprised that it's popping up," said Bates. "It seems that the implications of it would be commonly understood. It's not like the internet invented everything. Magazines imply a certain kind of storytelling. Magazines are where people went if they were passionate about a particular area because that was where you'd find the best expertise in that area, or a diversity of voices in that area....”

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Wikipedia, Smartphone Small Screen

Wikipedia vs. the Small Screen - NYTimes.com: "The Internet behemoths Google and Facebook have proved they can still attract users and advertisers as their traffic shifts from desktops to mobile devices. But at Wikipedia, the giant online encyclopedia, the transition to a mobile world raises a different existential question: Will people continue to create articles and edit its nine million existing ones on the small screen of a smartphone . . ."

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