The Register – Friday 18th August 2006:
To date, advances in automation have favoured journalists and generally made our jobs easier. Voice recorders mean we don’t have to learn shorthand, wordprocessors mean we don’t have to be good typists…or spellers…and voicemail means that some of us can, allegedly, tap into the messages of others.
But today my technological complacency was shattered on discovering that Thomson Financial, the US newswire, has hired computers to write articles. The old reporter’s saw is that good news is no news, and this is certainly news to me.
Thomson has built some computer programs at $150k-$200k a pop to deliver automated articles on US market news. The programs can publish a news story on, say, company financials, within 0.3 seconds of their release to the NYSE or NASDAQ. This is purportedly helpful to hedge traders and others of their ilk.
Thomson’s software compares the results with previous results held in its database, so the robot.txt can say if the company did better or worse than expected, the FT reports.
I for one welcome our Robot Over… errr Journalists .
Not exactly new news. Companies like ClearForest have been doing this for various publishers for years. While the technology is pretty arcane under the covers – deploying a system that reads multiple news feeds, extracts pertinent data and creates “synthetic” articles is a fairly common practice.
OBTW – 0.3 seconds is SLOW. These systems are running
Reminds me of Republican droid-bots ready to defend the President in any given blog-post.
Journalism without character won’t survive automation. That’s why John and his crew will survive.
Anon displaying more of that tolerance that liberals are so proud of.
Jeff,
When we liberals take back the government and make the conservatives a minority party again, I wonder if you are still going make fun of tolerance.
You conservatives better hope our guys don’t act like your guys did!
Wow, Anon, looks like you’ve offended the Jeff-bot.
I thought John’s PCMag column has been a bit pedantic. 🙂