

Robot Journalist writes a better story than human sports reporter - EwanToo
http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/04/18/robot-journalist-writes-a-better-story-than-human-sports-reporter/

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marcusbooster
Only because of the horrid sports journalism in the US that reads like a
police blotter. I follow some Euro-soccer and was amazed at the difference in
quality and breadth of the writing.

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aasarava
Not sure about European sports reporting, but the problem I've found with both
the US sports reporting and the Indian sports reporting that I've read is that
journalists are allowed to -- perhaps even encouraged to -- use sports jargon
without definition. If a tech reporter were to file a story containing
undefined three-letter acronyms (CRM, ROI, etc.) and refer to Python without
mentioned that it's a "programming language," his or her editor would mark it
up and send it back (as she should).

~~~
corin_
That would be the case if writing for a more general audience... but in a
publication whose audience is, say, digital marketing executives, "ROI" would
be perfectly fine. Of course, depending on the editorial guidelines that
publication follows, it might not be allowed because they don't like acronyms,
but not because it needed a definition.

With sports writing, you can't expect definitions for common sports jargon. In
F1 racing you have to assume that readers know what "pole position" is, in
football (US: soccer) you assume readers understand "offside", and so on. If
you were to explain every piece of sporting terminology in every article, it
would drive readers crazy.

As to acronyms, while it makes it even more confusing for people who don't
understand the sport, the vast majority of the readers are people who _do_
understand it. And for those who don't, it often wouldn't make a difference.
If I wasn't a baseball fan, "earned run average" wouldn't make any more sense
to me than "ERA".

The biggest difference between American sports and European sports (I'm not
familiar with MLS, so I'm not sure if this difference lies with the sport or
where it's being played, MLS perhaps fits with European football or perhaps
with sports such as baseball) is that American sports use way more terminology
and statistics, not just from journalists, but talked about by fans, shown in
stadiums, etc. If you watch a US baseball game, and a cricket game (not that
cricket is all European, but it is non-US), you'll see that difference hugely.

And that's actually something that fascinates me - I'm English, so such a big
focus on stats wasn't a part of sport for me growing up, but once I got into
NFL/MLB, I really love it. _But_ , it still seems like something that most
sports fans wouldnt care about, to me. Even though I know that they clearly
do.

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marcusbooster
Going off-topic, but what the hell. I grew up memorizing stats on the backs of
baseball cards and playing sports video games, so I agree that knowing the
numbers is as much a part of my understanding of the game as the actual rules.

What I enjoy about the English football writers I read, is they'll link sport
with culture, history, and politics. An upcoming match preview can feel like a
history lesson for an entire region. That's something you rarely find over
here (though Hunter S. Thompson used to do a sports column for ESPN that
covered all kinds of ground). I'd say most Americans get their sports news
through highlight shows, but there's always been the tradition of "checking
the box score" in the paper.

When soccer does hit mainstream news here, like during the World Cup, most of
the conversations seem to be around "how can we fix the game?", ie. goal-line
technology, etc. Maybe as a culture we like things that are more concrete,
which leads to something like the current NFL, new rules every year so it
takes 5 minutes for the officials to sort out a play.

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jsherry
I still think that the number one threat to professional journalists is the
low barrier to entry for people to get into journalism these days, not robots.
That said, this is really interesting and will likely play a role in
generating content from structured data (like baseball stats) at some point in
the relatively near future.

~~~
jawns
My take, as a professional journalist:

The number one threat to professional journalists is the fact that newspaper
readership has shifted from print to online, but revenue has not.

Until news companies figure out how to make as much money per online reader as
they used to make per print reader, the journalism world is going to continue
to be in trouble.

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chc
I've never really understood this. The cost of keeping our website up is not
even a percent of what it costs to lay out, print and distribute one dead tree
issue. We don't _need_ as much money as we once did. It just looks like a
reluctance to adjust to me.

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scott_s
Are you including the cost of people? That is, the cost of paying people to
maintain the servers, develop the backend and design the frontend?

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anamax
> Are you including the cost of people? That is, the cost of paying people to
> maintain the servers, develop the backend and design the frontend?

They're a lot cheaper than people involved in printing paper and distributing
it.

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scott_s
Can we put numbers on this? Even ballpark numbers. Because I'm thinking that
if you have one system admin, one frontend dev, and one backend dev, that will
cost at least $200,000 a year. That assumes that the cost of each person is at
least $66,666 a year - that is how much they cost, not how much they are paid.
I think that's a very low number, both in terms of number of people and in how
much they cost.

~~~
chc
Here's a ballpark:

[http://ask.metafilter.com/73789/Cost-of-printing-national-
ne...](http://ask.metafilter.com/73789/Cost-of-printing-national-
newsapaper#1097623)

And that's just printing, not counting the physical paper design folk, who
also cost money and who actually are needed to design each individual issue
(as opposed to website developers, who I maintain are not needed constantly to
update a site whose primary product is not software).

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tokenadult
Earlier submission from another publication:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2457864>

~~~
EwanToo
Sorry missed that one, you're right yeah.

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mcantor
God this stuff drives me insane. The "robot journalist" wrote a good article
because the _person who created it PROGRAMMED IT to write a good article_!
There were no skills inherent to the software that eclipsed the requirement of
having a creative human involved in the process. Articles like this don't
_mean_ anything.

~~~
jawns
Actually, articles like this _do_ mean something -- at least to the
journalists that the software is already beginning to make fear for their
jobs.

As a full-time journalist who has also written some "robot reporter" code --
see "I wrote this article with one mouse click,"
[http://coding.pressbin.com/60/I-wrote-this-article-with-
one-...](http://coding.pressbin.com/60/I-wrote-this-article-with-one-mouse-
click) \-- I know first-hand that even though it takes a creative human to
code the software, once the software is written, it's "set it and forget it"
... which means you no longer need to pay a journalist to write the article,
which means bye-bye journalism jobs. (Of course, it also means hello-hello
journalist-programmer jobs.)

~~~
sin7
How long before we have robot programmers?

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Locke1689
While the article doesn't mention it, the Narrative Science software and
company is a spin-off of this project[1], developed here at Northwestern
University as a joint project between the Medill School of Journalism and the
AI department.

[1] <http://infolab.northwestern.edu/projects/stats-monkey/>

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nextparadigms
Isn't it clear already that robots are disruptive to the human kind(regarding
jobs)?

"Damn robots taking our jobs!" - That's what Jesse Jackson will say 10 years
from now.

~~~
tsiki
If you're gonna complain about machines 'taking' humans' jobs, you're 300
years late to that party.

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mthomas
This is a single data point. Its best not to draw conclusions from it.

