If a bot can "cover" a small story about a 1.5-magnitude earthquake, then a journalist can head out to report on a political rally or a fire. First, publishers with tight budgets and smaller newsrooms are looking for ways to cover all news in the most efficient way possible. Bloomberg recently dissected the many ways Twitter bots are used to spread fake news or disparaging messages.īut based on the experiments conducted by WaPo and NYT, and bots' popularity on Twitter, the positive impact is twofold. Of course, accuracy is a concern, especially when bots are used for unscrupulous tasks or projects. So, what does this mean? Will bots replace journalists? How will we verify the accuracy of the stories we're receiving and who will we hold accountable? If publications must hire people to vet the bots' stories, wouldn't it just make sense to have them conceive, research, and write the stories to begin with? The answers aren't plain and simple the future of bots in news remains unseen. Roughly 250,000 people used this bot and had some form of what they believed was a personal experience. Confessore scripted out conversations beforehand so that everyone received a response. To best their Rio Olympics experiment, NYT worked with reporter Nick Confessore to craft daily political updates during the 2016 presidential campaign season. The feature was a hit, but he could only answer 1,300 of the messages a bot would've answered all 30,000. Manchester constructed 70 messages and received more than 30,000 texts. Though it wasn't a bot per se, the automation aspect created the same effect. Readers who texted NYT Sam received his texts.
#SIMON SAYS BOT SERIES#
During the Rio Olympics, the publication enlisted reporter Sam Manchester to construct a series of automated tweets about his observations during the games. The New York Times has also experimented with bot technology. Thus, Heliograf allows WaPo to cover every story without overloading every reporter.
#SIMON SAYS BOT SOFTWARE#
The software then alerts editors about any disparities via Slack.
Heliograf then connects to a structured data source and essentially fills in the blanks. They'd include phrases like "sales were up compared to last year", "sales were down compared to last year", and "record number of shoppers". Let's say they're building templates for Black Friday. These templates include phrasing that applies to multiple outcomes within that subject matter.
First, editors create a series of templates for specific subjects. In February, the Washington Post debuted Heliograf, an AI-powered, content-generating system designed to expand the paper's online readership with automated stories.
Facebook launched a news bot, along with a series of other bots, in April of this year.īut not to be outdone by social media platforms, some of the country's most established publications are taking new approaches to using bots to report the news. But other social media networks are following suit. automatically tweets out all seismic activity detected in the greater Los Angeles area. copies and pastes each of Donald Trump's tweets onto documents containing official White House letterhead and then tweets them. Twitter is perhaps the most common place to encounter journalism bots. But now, the news industry is using them to keep the public up to speed on the latest headlines. The e-commerce, banking, and education industries were quick to adapt bots into their business practices. From saving money to setting reminders, they automate parts of our lives and businesses and save us time. And now, it seems bots are becoming major participants in the 24-hour news cycle.īots are essentially computer programs using decision trees to handle everyday, real-world problems. Every time you ask Siri to add an appointment to your calendar, you're conversing with a bot. When you head online to report an issue with a clothing item you bought, it's likely your first point of contact is with a chatbot instead of an actual customer service representative. We interact with bots in various parts of our online activity. Now, in the third and final installment, we'll discuss how bots are, quite literally, changing the faces of those who report the news. In the second part, we explored how reporters are using social media to source and investigate breaking news stories. In the first part of our journalist series, we introduced you to Gabe Fleischer, a 15-year-old writer whose objective political newsletter is changing the way thousands of Americans read the news.
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