
Are Sportswriters Really Necessary?  - wglb
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_19/b4177037188386.htm
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tadhg
Technical considerations aside, I think a key question here is whether readers
expect just-the-facts stats-based reporting of what happened in the game, or a
narrative constructed from the game.

If it's the former, then "sportswriting" about any given game is really just
another data delivery/presentation format and should be automated (that, or
readers should gravitate towards more efficient data formats, like box
scores).

If it's the latter, then a writing program will have to fake creating a
narrative, which sounds like a much more difficult job to do. Local
sportswriters often know the players, making it far easier to construct
narratives around the personalities involved in the games.

My guess is that readers want the latter, but perhaps not enough to pay more,
so techniques like those employed by Narrative Science will probably become
increasingly common.

Personally, I think the best place for this is in business writing, because I
think that eliminating "narratives" from reporting market movements would lead
to far more accurate articles.

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iamdave
The only reason we hire people to do any given job is because we haven't found
a way to automate it yet

