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.

Can Good Come From the Recession?

One of my regular reads is Jacob Morgan’s blog – I’ve mentioned him before on here – as he usually has something interesting to say, and he’s very prolific too. Most of his posts take a inquisitive tone, he asks for opinions or thoughts from his audience (which is a great way to interact), and he appears to be generally optimistic.

Which is why I was pretty surprised by the apparent anger and ‘doom+gloom-ery’ in this post.

Don’t get me wrong, I think everyone is pretty angry at having to bail out private companies, and then see them blow $400,000 on a spa retreat. I doubt many felt a great deal of sympathy for the Lehman Bros CEO after he was punched by an employee on Sunday (not that we condone violence, obviously!). Right now anger is perfectly understandable.

But anger, as John Lydon used to sing, is an energy, and that is where I think I differ from Jacob on this one.

His blog was a response to this post on O’Reilly.com, suggesting that the recession will be good for innovation. So to some degree it looks like they are talking at cross-purposes. Saying that a recession is good for tech+innovation isn’t the same as saying that a recession is a good thing.

For example, I think I can safely assume that most people think the Second World War was a ‘Bad Thing’ – the Holocaust, 100s of millions of lives lost, the beginning of the Cold War, etc, etc. The closet we have seen to Hell on Earth.

And yet it is also undeniable that those tragic circumstances were good for technology and innovation – the birth of the modern computer, jets, nuclear technology, medical advances in skin grafts, antibiotics, the birth of the Space Age and so on. People can debate whether or not those things would have happened anyway, but it is true that the war speeded up the process due to necessity, and the same can be true of a recession.

The last recession wiped out jobs too, but (just in the Internet industry) some of those talented people working behind the scenes at Pets.com, Flooz.com and other sites which seem like jokes now, have gone on to create much greater value at Google, Yahoo, Ebay and other success stories. Who knows what great things will be invented by a programmer who gets laid off by AOL, for example?

Nobody wants a recession. I feel enormous sympathy for anyone who is suffering at this time because of things that are beyond their control. But I am (naively?) an optimist. I like to believe that when people are pushed to find new ways of doing things they will. I think that history has shown that this country is better equipped than most to allow new ideas to become great. Yes, many will be hurt be the coming financial problems, but some of those people will use that as a springboard to achieve something wonderful, and that will help to lift us all out of the recession.

After all, this is a country where even bank robbers are finding innovative uses for Internet services. I’ll continue to have faith in the power of people to overcome adversity through technology.