Algorithms producing journalism? What might sound like a futuristic setting is already becoming reality. Last week the sports statistics website StatSheet announced a plan to produce completely automated sports content as of this summer. And in a partnership with the Medill school of journalism, the Intelligent Information Laboratory of the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University has developed an algorithm called StatsMonkey that publishes game stories.
The Laboratory is also interested in programming algorithms to cover local stories. As the local news outlets are struggling to stay alive, they might have better chances if they can expand their news coverage.
There are a lot of topics on the table. Should it be made transparent if a text is written by a human or an algorithm? Who controls what the algorithms finds? Is an algorithm more or less open to influence than a journalist? And as the algorithm partly uses what was already written, what happens with copyright? And last but not least, assumed the programming is getting better: do algorithms steal the work of journalists - or help them to cope with information overload?
Read more at The Guardian or watch this video of virtual news put together by researchers at Northwestern' McCormick School of Engineering.
