News in this sense is just catching up to the financial world. Big finance has had bots that parse news feeds and raw data for YEARS as part of their high frequency trading (HFT) platforms as a form of arbitrage.
So let's say a major earthquake happens in San Francisco and the Google HQ falls into a bottomless pit. The trading algorithms will know about the earthquake within seconds, and they will also know about likely know about Google's obliteration from speech-to-text of police scanners. The millisecond these reports hit the wire, the HFT algorithms would likely short the hell out of Google's stock immediately while also placing positive bets on Google's competitors as well as construction companies and building suppliers. And this was going on 10 years ago; they're probably light years ahead of this by now.
It's also not very hard to write the second piece given the right machine learning technology. Feed a decade's worth of human-generated articles into an algorithm (which could also be paired with marketing metrics like page views, avg time spent on page, etc.) and the algorithm picks out the types of statistics it should look up from the databases and how those statistics should be incorporated into the story. Heck, if you wanted to get really fancy, you could try to pick the major themes of the game out of a transcript of the play-by-play or specific emotional moments of the game by measuring the level of crowd noise or twitter traffic.
A computer will have better information recall, better research skills and better perspective to write stories that are more appealing to people. Heck, they could even write a story on the fly designed to appeal specifically to the individual's preferences. I understand that there's a place for reporters, but I don't think it's going to be written event-based reporting for much longer.
So let's say a major earthquake happens in San Francisco and the Google HQ falls into a bottomless pit. The trading algorithms will know about the earthquake within seconds, and they will also know about likely know about Google's obliteration from speech-to-text of police scanners. The millisecond these reports hit the wire, the HFT algorithms would likely short the hell out of Google's stock immediately while also placing positive bets on Google's competitors as well as construction companies and building suppliers. And this was going on 10 years ago; they're probably light years ahead of this by now.
It's also not very hard to write the second piece given the right machine learning technology. Feed a decade's worth of human-generated articles into an algorithm (which could also be paired with marketing metrics like page views, avg time spent on page, etc.) and the algorithm picks out the types of statistics it should look up from the databases and how those statistics should be incorporated into the story. Heck, if you wanted to get really fancy, you could try to pick the major themes of the game out of a transcript of the play-by-play or specific emotional moments of the game by measuring the level of crowd noise or twitter traffic.
A computer will have better information recall, better research skills and better perspective to write stories that are more appealing to people. Heck, they could even write a story on the fly designed to appeal specifically to the individual's preferences. I understand that there's a place for reporters, but I don't think it's going to be written event-based reporting for much longer.