Robot Journalism: A New Way of Reporting Breaking News

Robot Journalism: A New Way of Reporting Breaking News

Robot journalism, with the help of artificial intelligence, is boosting the field of journalism.
News stories are created by computer programs in automated journalism, also known as algorithmic journalism or robot journalism. Stories are generated automatically by computers rather than by human reporters thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. These programs analyze, organize, and present data in a form that is understandable to humans. Typically, an algorithm examines huge quantities of given data, chooses from a variety of pre-programmed article formats, organizes important points, and inserts information like names, places, amounts, rankings, statistics, and other numbers. The output may be tailored to a specific voice, tone, or style. Some data is converted into news reports written in human language in robot journalism. Natural language generation (NLG) methods are used to accomplish this. When structured data is available and the issue is repeated, robot journalism is the ideal fit. Collection of data, identification of noteworthy occurrences, prioritization of insights, production of the narrative, and ultimately publication of the news are the five steps of automated journalism.

Automated journalism is often viewed as a way to liberate journalists from regular reporting and give them more time to work on more difficult projects. It also provides for more efficiency and cost-cutting, easing some of the financial pressures that many news companies are under. Automated journalism, on the other hand, is seen as a threat to the authorship and quality of news, as well as to human journalists’ livelihoods.

 

Advantages of Robot Journalism:
Speed:

Automatization enables rapid publication of news stories – as source data becomes available, a story may be produced almost instantly. Robot journalists are designed to produce enormous amounts of data at a faster rate. According to the associated press, automation has boosted the number of profit reports received from consumers by more than tenfold. They can generate 150-to-300-word pieces in the time it takes journalists to analyze figures and compile content using automated insights software and data from other firms. Journalists will have more time for hard duties like investigative reporting and in-depth analysis of events if regular articles and activities are automated.

Cost

Because more material can be generated in less time, automated journalism is less expensive. It also saves news companies money on labor. Reduced human input implies lower wages, salaries, paid time off, vacations, and employment insurance costs. For news organizations with limited resources but a desire to retain the extent and quality of their coverage, automation is a cost-cutting option.

Free of errors

It is stated that automated journalism systems are less prone to faults since they do not commit blunders like misspellings or math errors. In other words, their accuracy is superior to that of human journalists – providing that the code is free of mistakes and the underlying data is accurate.

 

Disadvantages of Robot Journalism:
Authorship

There is sometimes misunderstanding over who should be attributed as the author in an automated article. Research on algorithmic authorship found that some participants assigned credit to the programmer, while others saw the news organization as the author, stressing the collaborative aspect of the work. There is no way for a reader to tell if an article was written by a robot or a person, which presents concerns of transparency, however, similar issues exist when human authors assign authorship to each other.

Quality and Trustworthiness

Concerns regarding the perceived trustworthiness of automated news are comparable to general concerns about news credibility. Beyond human review, there are now a plethora of algorithmic approaches for identifying machine-written articles. While some articles may still include flaws that are evident to a person, these automated identifiers may sometimes outperform human-written articles.

Employment

One of the main concerns about robot journalism is the loss of jobs for journalists when publications use artificial intelligence (AI).

At least in sectors that rely significantly on data, such as sports and finance, robot journalism is becoming the standard. Its influence may now be noticed when human journalists are given more time to examine different news perspectives and topics rather than conducting repetitious labor. Additionally, news companies can produce more information and reach a larger audience.