What’s Going On With the Media–Journalism Interviewing Data Bases, People And Journo Bot Comes In To Play…

Kenneth Cukier from the Economist explains in this 15 minute video how the face of journalism is changing and as readers we don’t all of it, but it’s good to be aware and understand what they are working with today. He states sure we need both, input from people and data. News media companies are all hiring data scientists to handle some of the more complex data situations to take a look at data and see if there’s story in it. We get some good stories and sometimes we get junk with numbers that may not relate to us as consumers. We have to remember too that stock markets on Monday through Friday when the markets are open, the bots get the news first and we are the secondary audience to the bot.

Working with information is a must for the future of journalism he states and the same art of story telling is not going to go away at any time he says. Individuals will need to have a basic familiarity with the data tools. Cukier predicts that news will be created in “teams” and that can include both stories on humans and with data. It’s hard to find all those skills in one person.

There’s also the journobot that is automating some of the news we read and you see some of that already out there. Data on it’s own can be very misleading and he called the Economist a “views paper” and gives options for readers to choose from. Also we have to be aware of over quantitation and I wrote about that a while back with some news articles we read today.

Quantitated Justification For Believing Things That Are Not True And Using Mathematical Processes To Fool Ourselves-The Journalistic Bot Functionality Debuts As Media Can’t Resist the Formulas…

Here’s a video that will set you on your side to see how automated news can be. The creator wrote 10,000 books with this journo bot and put them on sale at Amazon and a little data news story is no problem.

This is a very complex bot and there are others out there that are simpler in design but keep in mind these are some of the tools that are being used by journalists today. BD