AOL is unveiling its Seed project at Austin's SXSW. The plan is to mix freelance and pro-journalists to create a huge amount of original content. The effort is "fielding an army of freelancers to cover SXSW’s 2000 bands is certainly a baptism by fire."
“The essence of journalism has always been separating signal from noise says Saul Hansell, a former New York Times writer who is now the Programming Director of Seed. “It’s all judgment. It’s all selecting the best bits.” What AOL hopes to create with Seed is an editorial machine which automates the assignment process as much as possible, but keeps the final selection part in human hands.
“I call it Bionic Journalism,” says Hansell.
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