Journalism: computer vs. human

Technology changes every day and as it does, it affect us and how we do certain things. These changes sometimes also mean that new possible paths are created when it comes to journalism. Over the years as technology has evolved journalism grew into different directions like multimedia, online and now even automated journalism.

Automated journalism, also known as automated reporting is what it says it is – a story is automatically put together by a computer. DemandGen defines this new kind of journalism as: “Report automation is the process of scheduling an existing report to automatically refresh and be delivered to specific places at a specific regular interval.”

One of the benefits of automating reports is that it saves a company time. If you take this benefit and you put it into a business perspective you will know that time costs money. Through saving time journalists can now also focus on doing other things that really needs attention. Automated reporting comes with disadvantages as well. Though the computer may write a story more accurately than a human journalist I feel that it does not write with passion mainly because computers do not have feelings.

With journalism going into this direction, journalists might want to find more and other ways to stay employed. I read through the Tow Centre Guide to Automated Journalism and according to this guide the jobs of journalists might be in jeopardy with newsrooms making more use of automation reporting by the day. “Automated journalism will likely replace journalists who merely cover routine topics, but will also generate new jobs within the development of news-generating algorithms.”

I think that automated reporting does influence the future of journalism. Journalists will now have the opportunity to learn other skills and take on other opportunities that they have always wanted to take on. Celeste LeCompte, wrote in an article, Automation in the Newsroom, that, “These tools support news organizations in their push to develop new storytelling formats that highlight the relationships between news events and help provide readers with richer context.”

Automation reporting however still needs the help of the human journalist. Computers cannot go out and collect information and they cannot do interviews either while journalists on the other hand can. This proves that automation reporting cannot survive without a human journalist by its side, feeding it the data that is needed to produce a story.

Resources:

Photos:

http://www.badpitchblog.com/2014/12/will-pr-automation-put-you-out-of-job.html

http://blog.arria.com/897-2

Readings:

Marketing Metrics Magic: Should you automate reports or implement a dashboard?

http://towcenter.org/research/guide-to-automated-journalism/

http://niemanreports.org/articles/automation-in-the-newsroom/