Only because of the horrid sports journalism in the US that reads like a police blotter. I follow some Euro-soccer and was amazed at the difference in quality and breadth of the writing.
Not sure about European sports reporting, but the problem I've found with both the US sports reporting and the Indian sports reporting that I've read is that journalists are allowed to -- perhaps even encouraged to -- use sports jargon without definition. If a tech reporter were to file a story containing undefined three-letter acronyms (CRM, ROI, etc.) and refer to Python without mentioned that it's a "programming language," his or her editor would mark it up and send it back (as she should).
I still think that the number one threat to professional journalists is the low barrier to entry for people to get into journalism these days, not robots. That said, this is really interesting and will likely play a role in generating content from structured data (like baseball stats) at some point in the relatively near future.
The number one threat to professional journalists is the fact that newspaper readership has shifted from print to online, but revenue has not.
Until news companies figure out how to make as much money per online reader as they used to make per print reader, the journalism world is going to continue to be in trouble.
God this stuff drives me insane. The "robot journalist" wrote a good article because the person who created it PROGRAMMED IT to write a good article! There were no skills inherent to the software that eclipsed the requirement of having a creative human involved in the process. Articles like this don't mean anything.
Actually, articles like this do mean something -- at least to the journalists that the software is already beginning to make fear for their jobs.
As a full-time journalist who has also written some "robot reporter" code -- see "I wrote this article with one mouse click," http://coding.pressbin.com/60/I-wrote-this-article-with-one-... -- I know first-hand that even though it takes a creative human to code the software, once the software is written, it's "set it and forget it" ... which means you no longer need to pay a journalist to write the article, which means bye-bye journalism jobs. (Of course, it also means hello-hello journalist-programmer jobs.)
I'm not sure why it doesn't mean anything, surely the simple point of the software being written is to automate the task?
Software like this can be used to amplify the productivity and creativity of 50 individuals, or indeed to replace 50 individuals each typing out their own report with 1 individual producing 1 computer program to produce the 50 reports.
While the article doesn't mention it, the Narrative Science software and company is a spin-off of this project[1], developed here at Northwestern University as a joint project between the Medill School of Journalism and the AI department.
[+] [-] marcusbooster|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aasarava|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsherry|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jawns|15 years ago|reply
The number one threat to professional journalists is the fact that newspaper readership has shifted from print to online, but revenue has not.
Until news companies figure out how to make as much money per online reader as they used to make per print reader, the journalism world is going to continue to be in trouble.
[+] [-] tokenadult|15 years ago|reply
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2457864
[+] [-] EwanToo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcantor|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jawns|15 years ago|reply
As a full-time journalist who has also written some "robot reporter" code -- see "I wrote this article with one mouse click," http://coding.pressbin.com/60/I-wrote-this-article-with-one-... -- I know first-hand that even though it takes a creative human to code the software, once the software is written, it's "set it and forget it" ... which means you no longer need to pay a journalist to write the article, which means bye-bye journalism jobs. (Of course, it also means hello-hello journalist-programmer jobs.)
[+] [-] EwanToo|15 years ago|reply
Software like this can be used to amplify the productivity and creativity of 50 individuals, or indeed to replace 50 individuals each typing out their own report with 1 individual producing 1 computer program to produce the 50 reports.
[+] [-] ugh|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] william42|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Locke1689|15 years ago|reply
[1] http://infolab.northwestern.edu/projects/stats-monkey/
[+] [-] nextparadigms|15 years ago|reply
"Damn robots taking our jobs!" - That's what Jesse Jackson will say 10 years from now.
[+] [-] tsiki|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mthomas|15 years ago|reply