Rise of the machine reporters

Anthony Zurcher bbc.com As if journalists didn't have enough to worry about these days, what with the print portion of their industry dying a long, slow death and the digital product often given away for free. Now comes the rise of the machine reporter. A few minutes after a minor earthquake hit Southern California on Monday morning, the Los Angeles Times featured an article about the event on its website, with help from a computer algorithm written by one of the paper's developers. It's not the first time the newspaper has used automated reporting. And the Times isn't the first media outlet to rely on such systems. Entire companies, such as Narrative Science (business news) and Automated Insights (sports), have business models built around the idea of mechanised journalism. to read more: bbc.com