media seo analytics | push2digital

A great Mashable post highlights the latest developments in machine-generated news, specifically a project out of Northwestern University called Stats Monkey. This group has produced a system that can create finished articles without the benefit of a human editor.

Now before media types panic that computers will now replace the writing of stories as well, keep in mind this project targets stories with a very predictable format.

"The system scopes across any sport or event in which the events produce significant quantitative data." Wait, stop there "significant quantitative data" in this case means a baseball box score and a play-by-play broadcast.

"Recurring story types that are primarily data-driven, including other kinds of sports stories and many kinds of business stories such as quarterly or annual earnings stories, market updates, and so on."

Now the question journalists should ask is not, "How can I create my baseball game story faster than this system?" This system simply exposes a truth that some types of news stories are formulaic. They don't really require a journalist and haven't for years. The question I would ask is, "Why should my journalist be writing game stories and market reports at all?"

I don't need a seasoned journalist for that, I need the journalist to provide context around these data-driven stories and explain how they affect me, my team, my stock portfolio. To be honest with you, machine-generated news has been around for a while, it's called Google. I can get my score by typing "red sox score" in any search window. What I need a journalist to do is tell my why they've lost 5 of their last 6 and when it will stop.