Technology’s had a whopping impact on the news. It's upended the media industry and changed the way publications generate revenue.
Now, Google is upping the ante by supporting an endeavor across the Atlantic that aims to change the way local news is actually written, reports April Glaser for Recode.net.
Ms. Glaser writes:
Google is awarding the Press Association, a large British news agency, $805,000 to build software to automate the writing of 30,000 local stories a month.
[...]
The Press Assocation received the funding in partnership with Urbs Media, an automation software startup specializing in combing through large open datasets. Together, the Press Assocation and Urbs Media will work on a software project dubbed Radar, which stands for Reporters And Data And Robots.
According to the article, humans will still have a role to play in guiding the AI.
Radar aims to automate local reporting with large public databases from government agencies or local law enforcement – basically roboticizing the work of reporters. Stories from the data will be penned using Natural Language Generation, which converts information gleaned from the data into words.
The robotic reporters won’t be working alone. The grant includes funds allocated to hire five journalists to identify datasets, as well as curate and edit the news articles generated from Radar. ...
“Skilled human journalists will still be vital in the process,” said Peter Clifton, the editor in chief of the Press Assocation ...
While local news reporting in the US will likely remain the purview of non-robotic writers for at least the immediate future, Americans have probably already skimmed through text generated by automated journalism – courtesy of the AP.
As Ms. Glaser writes in her piece:
The Associated Press ... started using automation software to generate stories about corporate financial quarterly earnings in 2014. The AP now posts thousands of stories every quarter with the help of its robotic reporting tools.
But the AP generally automates the generation of stories that don’t require investigation. ...
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