Black, white, and read all over
During the recent elections, on both sides of the Atlantic, we've seen a great deal of fake news, news taken out of context, and cherry-picking of facts and rumours to create citizen journalism and post truth reporting. The final nail for career journalists could be a project between Google and The Press Association to automate news writing on an industrial scale.
The Press Association was established in London in 1868, and it is a "newswire" service, similar to Reuters (also based in London), Associated Press (AP) in the USA, Factwire in Hong Kong, and so on. These news agencies employ journalists to research, fact-check, and write news articles but they do not publish their own newspapers or produce their own TV programmes. Instead they syndicate the material to other newspapers, and for many years the Press Association newswire has has been a major source of news materials for provincial newspapers throughout the UK.
In 2014, the USA news agency, AP, began using automated tools to generate news articles about company financial reports, and now generates thousands of stories each year this way. This system works well because it is fed with the financial data from US companies which is already in electronic format, which requires no fact checking, and the news robots are good at comparing current figures with previous years, a task which has potential for mistakes when performed by human reporters. For the financial journals which it is addressing, the AP system works well.
However, some people think automated news generation could be taken much further. This month Google has awarded The UK's Press Association around $800,000 to build a system which will generate stories on an industrial scale at a rate of about 30,000 articles a month. The plan is to take large public data sets such as council records, police reports, and so on, and use natural language processing and AI methods to turn the data into articles. The project will also look at ways to automatically add images and video to robot-built stories. The $0.8m of funding is less than 0.5% of the $170 million total that Google has committed to investing in digital newsroom innovation projects across Europe.
What does this mean for the news industry? We live in an era when newspapers are really struggling to survive because people get more and more of their news online for free, and a steadily growing percentage of people now say they get almost all their news from Facebook. Many newspapers have tried out various online subscription models (or paywalls), but all that does is push the readers towards other publications which offer unfettered access to identical syndicated news stories on advert-supported websites. Increasingly those competitor sites have none of the overheads of journalists or paper print runs, or even an advertising sales department, relying instead of ad-broker services, the biggest of which is Google.
Is Google's project raising the overall quality of journalism by automating the mundane and freeing up journalists to concentrate on the high-quality investigative journalism and analysis? Or is it making news such a commodity item that the only economic model for publishers in future will be an ocean of free sites carrying news agency articles and citizen journalism, all funded by Google advertising?
27th July 2017
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.