Just Give that Assignment to the Computer

As a long-time journalist, an article in Bloomberg Businessweek a couple of months back gave me pause. In fact, I found it truly disturbing. It was about a new piece of technology called Narrative Science that takes data-intensive information and turns out a news story.

The example was sports stories; stats are e-mailed to Narrative Science where a computer pops out an article in just a few minutes. The Big Ten Network is using the service as is Fox Cable for its baseball and softball coverage on its website.

As if journalists weren’t concerned enough about their jobs, now they have to worry they will be replaced by computers. “There’s no human author and no human editing,” Narrative Science CEO Stuart Frankel is quoted as saying.

And if you don’t have human authors and editors, you don’t have paychecks to hand out every two weeks. Sure, it’s a significant financial savings, but at what cost? Articles won’t have the context and perspective a human can bring. They won’t have the historical information and analytical eye that trained and experienced journalists provide. It’s a good bet the writing won’t be as polished and will probably be filled with clichés and unimaginative writing.

To bring this a little closer to home, from a public relations perspective, it’s a little tough to suggest a story idea or source to a computer.

Using a computer to generate short online stats-driven stories for the website and saving the meatier pieces for the journalists would certainly be a slightly better option, yet it still takes away jobs from interns and young reporters who often cut their teeth on these sorts of assignments.

Granted, widespread use of technology like Narrative Science may be many years in the future, but whether it’s five or 50, it’s unfortunate something like this would even be considered. It’s clear more and more people assume the skills of reporting, writing and interviewing are something anyone – even a computer – can do.