Making journalism semi-automatic

Squirrelled away at the Press Association's (PA) headquarters in London is a small team of journalists and software engineers.They're working on a computer system that can do the work of multiple human beings, picking out interesting local data trends - everything from crime statistics to how many babies are being born out of wedlock. As part of a trial, the PA has begun emailing selected machine-generated stories, no more than several paragraphs or so in length, to local newspapers that might want to use such material.

Mr Clifton points out that, at this stage, the system simply amplifies the work human journalists do, some of whom are involved in developing the system's output. The automated part is currently limited to trawling through the data, something that would take humans far longer to do.

Sometimes human journalists will rewrite or add to the algorithms' copy, but quite often, he says, it is published verbatim. Automated stories about smoking during pregnancy, recycling rates, or cancelled operations have all found their way online and in print.

The BBC does not currently publish stories that have been generated by algorithms, says Robert McKenzie, editor of the corporation's News Labs research team. But News Labs has worked on tools to automate other parts of journalists' jobs, he says, including "the transcription of interviews and identification of unusual trends in public data".

While AI is undoubtedly going to become more present in newsrooms, Joshua Benton at Harvard University's Nieman Journalism Lab doesn't think it yet poses a serious threats to jobs. There are far greater pressures, such as falling advertising revenues, he believes. And he also says the really difficult and most highly scrutinised part of what professional journalists do - carefully weighing information and presenting balanced, contextualised stories - will be very hard for machines to master.

"Good journalism is not just a matter of inputs and outputs, there is a craft that, however imperfect, has evolved over decades," he explains. "I'm not saying that machines will never get there, but I think they're still a pretty long way away."

The problem is that bad journalism is easy to automate, and bad journalism tends to be profitable.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-42858174