Automated Breaking News

Steiner’s new service uses the output from the Wikimedia Live Monitor as the input search term for Social Media Illustrator. The result is a set of images associated with the breaking news event organized in a grid. Steiner’s assumption is that these images somehow tell the story behind the news event. He publishes these images on Twitter at https://twitter.com/mediagalleries. (source infra)

The Evolution of Automated Breaking News Stories | MIT Technology Review: "A quick glance at the twitter feed reveals where more work is needed. One problem is that in many cases, it is not at all clear what breaking news stories the images refer to. Neither are the images generated in the media gallery hyperlinked, so it’s not possible to click through and see where they came from. What’s more, the images need to be cropped so they fit together in a grid but this often results in important information being lost, such as captions being cropped. That’s not to say that the approach doesn’t have potential. There is a growing interest in the automated production of news, and algorithms now exist that van do this in some circumstances with varying degrees of success. It’s quite possible that some of the news we consume in the future will be spotted, evaluated and written and illustrated by an algorithm." (read more at link above)

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