Automating Online News Collections

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the I-have-an-opinion-about-this.. dept

In a topic near and dear to my ability to get paid, Wired has an article about the various new systems for automated news gathering. The article asks whether or not these automated systems and filters will eventually make human editors obsolete. I think it’s fairly obvious to just about everyone that the human editor will always have something to do with news gathering. But, more importantly, the human’s ability to editorialize and have an opinion is what makes the human commentary infinitely more interesting than what the computer spits out (except, it seems, for when the computer makes mistakes in its attempts at automated summarizing – which gets points for the amusement factor). Personally, I think automated news gathering services are great. They’re an extremely important tool in my daily work with Techdirt Corporate Intelligence – but it’s the human analysis and opinion on top of the filtering that our clients pay for.