When Reporters Get Hands-on with Robo-Writing

Abstract

The availability of data feeds, the demand for news on digital devices, and advances in algorithms are helping to make automated journalism more prevalent. This article extends the literature on the subject by analysing professional journalists’ experiences with, and opinions about, the technology. Uniquely, the participants were drawn from a range of news organizations—including the BBC, CNN, and Thomson Reuters—and had first-hand experience working with robo-writing software provided by one of the leading technology suppliers. The results reveal journalists’ judgements on the limitations of automation, including the nature of its sources and the sensitivity of its “nose for news”. Nonetheless, journalists believe that automated journalism will become more common, increasing the depth, breadth, specificity, and immediacy of information available. While some news organizations and consumers may benefit, such changes raise ethical and societal issues and, counter-intuitively perhaps, may increase the need for skills—news judgement, curiosity, and scepticism—that human journalists embody.

Keywords:

• algorithmic journalism
• automated journalism
• computational journalism
• journalism ethics
• media economics
• news production
• professional skills
• robot journalism

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Hedvig Sandbu and Stuart Scott for their assistance and “the company” for providing access to and training on the natural language generation software platform.

Notes

1. Natural language generation is defined as software and computer systems which automatically produce human (natural) language from a computational representation of information (Reiter and Dale 2000).

2. The terms “algorithmic journalism” (van Dalen 2012; Dörr 2016) and “robot journalism” (Carlson 2014) are also used to describe the phenomenon.

3. This framework takes inspiration from Lewis and Westlund’s (2015) article on big data in journalism.

4. Defined by The Oxford English Dictionary as “the headline of a newspaper”, but used more widely by journalists when referring to the most newsworthy aspect of a story.

5. Such as those provided by Opta, the “Official Media Data Partner of the Premier League”, http://www.optasports.com/events/premier-league.aspx.

6. For example, the award-winning “What if the Syrian Civil War Happened in Your Country?”, by Public Radio International, that uses data from the United Nations, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, and the World Health Organization.

7. For example, one of our respondents (I) identified the work being done by the 400 Thomson Reuters employees in Bangalore—such as producing reports on “share price moves in the morning”—as “very, very easy” to automate.