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Want your news delivered with the icy indifference of a literal robot? You might want to bookmark the newly launched site Knowhere News. Knowhere is a startup that combines machine learning technologies and human journalists to deliver the facts on popular news stories.
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Want your news delivered with the icy indifference of a literal robot? You might want to bookmark the newly launched site Knowhere News. Knowhere is a startup that combines machine learning technologies and human journalists to deliver the facts on popular news stories.
Honestly I like the idea of the news being delivered without having to deal with the personal opinions or emotions of a human journalist. Completely fact-driven news without all the extra fluff that you get when human journalists feel the need to insert their own personal narratives while they are delivering a news story to the public. I feel like this would allow people to make up their own minds about what they see or hear in the news, instead of allowing the personal feelings of journalists to sway them one way or the other.
Journalism, practiced properly, is a near-robotic search for the truth, distilling all the distortion of that truth clean of all emotional, political, business etc. interests.
There is no journalism taking place on TV. Cable "news" should not even be called "news." The practices of Sinclair Broadcasting are not "news." Journalism does not have political affiliations.
The problem is when humans are charged with the job of journalism. Like any other people, journalists have to eat. Investigative journalism is expensive and time-consuming, and it does not always bear fruit. Sometimes you dig and you dig and there's nothing to be found.
Journalism does not create anything of tangible value to the economy, yet is vital to democracy and a service that is still in demand, yet no longer has a business model that supports it.
When I worked in the newsroom, I did not directly produce a red cent for the paper as far as the front office was concerned. My paychecks came from the sale of classified ads, which took a dive with the rest of the ad market when craigslist and similar online services became a thing. Believe it or not, it wasn't news being online that killed the newspaper. For several years even after the dot-com boom and bust, the local paper had a virtual monopoly on local classified advertising, until the Internet had a venue to direct hyper-local ads like so for free. Not coincidentally, I was out of a full-time newsroom gig around the time we passed that point.
I started an internship in an era where we would make fun of the Soviets for having its state media put out prepared statements like the Sinclair TV anchors. A lot has changed, and not for the better. At that time, we had not seen the full impact of the 1996 Telecommunications Act that was a complete hatchet job on the profession, and helped nurture the environment we see today.
J
Journalism does not create anything of tangible value to the economy, yet is vital to democracy and a service that is still in demand, yet no longer has a business model that supports it.
That is a profound statement and bears repeating.
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I've asked the denizens of this subforum, when they demand better journalistic standards in the (mis)information they are served, what they think should be done, not that I received much in the way of replies. I'm increasingly of the mindset that an NPR-style funding model is the only way to ensure any modicum of integrity.
In theory an artificial intelligence is ideal, but there are critical processes that algorithms can't replicate, and then who programs it, and to do what? Back in 1999 when I started my internship, we talked about stuff like whether our jobs would ever be automated.
I don't think anyone saw the future of mass media as we have it now.
I've asked the denizens of this subforum, when they demand better journalistic standards in the (mis)information they are served, what they think should be done, not that I received much in the way of replies. I'm increasingly of the mindset that an NPR-style funding model is the only way to ensure any modicum of integrity..
I honestly wouldn't have any answers either, though I think it is a huge problem.
I think the AI model comes close, or at least closer than anything else I can think of.
On the other hand, I went to their site and wasn't impressed with the info, it was like an executive summary on the issues, but no substance. I'm guessing this is the Beta page... but I don't know.
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I arrived in my first newsroom in 1978. Objectivity was a concept that had been drilled into me since high school. We were trained to use our personal experiences and knowledge to gather the news, but to leave anything personal out of delivering the news.
To me, the overwhelming issue in journalism now is the lack of checks and balances. As a city-side reporter, my immediate supervisor was the city editor. He read every inch of my copy before passing it onto the copy editors, who did their magic, and then onto the news editor, who read the copy in order to fit it onto the page. That's four people reading copy after the reporter, four people questioning the words I chose and their meaning and how they fit together. Any words that were the least little bit subjective would have been deleted (one editor I worked for allowed us to use no more than one adjective per paragraph. It was tough, but it also was a good exercise in choosing words). If something I wrote didn't make sense, or was questionable, or was incorrect, they called me on it (usually late at night right before press time).
That layer of editing and oversight is gone - there might be one editor doing the work of three, or one editor on site and another working remotely miles away who has no familiarity with local people, places, or issues. There are fewer reporters, fewer editors. The 24-hour news cycle perpetuated the race to get the news out first, accuracy be damned ("we can fix that later" - although they usually don't). The news gets out - often without anyone other than the reporter reading it - but at a much lower quality.
it was like an executive summary on the issues, but no substance.
Because this is where the human touch comes in. Summaries are not good enough. We can program an app to compile data. Mark Zuckerberg has already done that on a grand scale, and called it Facebook. It had to make people voluntarily submit information on everything from where they live to what brand of shampunoo they use to tailor content to what interests them. The only thing an AI can really do to determine the human interest aspect is profile people based on myriad forms of metadata that will result in a Facebook-style ideological echo chamber long before it results in an aggregator of balanced journalism.
We have an interactions-based model in the new media. Ad revenue in the newspaper did not gauge whether you actually interacted with anything on a particular page. Now it does, and it encourages misleading headlines that often are contradicted by the actual story.
The legacy media, what remains of it, has prostituted itself to the new media interactions model. Dan Rather bartered his reputation trying to play the cable "news" gotcha game. Tried to make something out of nothing. That was only the beginning.
Honestly, it makes no difference what you put in print anymore. It's going to be read on the Internet, typically with an unmoderated comments section full of anonymous cowards who will control the message. Some people would cheer this. See, we've got people who will tell you to reject the bias in the article and replace it with his.
I still worked full time in the newsroom when Fox News was sending Geraldo Rivera to Iraq to draw his unit's positions in the sand like John Madden diagramming a football play. We thought that was as low as it could go. How little we knew.
That layer of editing and oversight is gone - there might be one editor doing the work of three, or one editor on site and another working remotely miles away who has no familiarity with local people, places, or issues. There are fewer reporters, fewer editors. The 24-hour news cycle perpetuated the race to get the news out first, accuracy be damned ("we can fix that later" - although they usually don't). The news gets out - often without anyone other than the reporter reading it - but at a much lower quality.
Now there are no editors. Typos, inconsistent style, missing/repeating sentences etc. reign supreme. Sometimes from publications that, at one time, I hoped to work at one day.
Even when I worked, and this was later - the Internet was a thing - they cut back. There were some days when the composing room was pretty much editorial, and that blew up bigtime one day in September 2001. Our city editor got himself fired after writing a column and publishing it without any oversight, that became a national news story. Long story short, it criticized G.W. Bush's response to 9/11 about a week after the fact. Cue cancelled subscriptions and death threats called in.
Suffice that our publisher was pretty well chagrined over it, and he wrote a column of his own praising Bush the next day. But when it comes to how we landed in a spot where someone in the newsroom can put something in print without any second opinions, that more or less is the responsibility of the front office, which generally thinks of the newsroom as a money pit that produces no revenue. I mean, why would you pay more people just to read copy?
It seemed like an erosion of practices and protocols then, but now it just seems normal.
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