Feb
6
Robotic Journalism and Death Row
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
I am still rolling across America, in a journey last week from San Diego to New York (again) for the DeSilva+Phillips Media Dealmakers Summit at the Pierre, and now on to Nashville, Tennessee. More below on the conference, but first back to a theme started in my blog “News not fit to Print”. I am becoming obsessed with the science around automated story development, and now see it everywhere I look. And everywhere I look I see a Western culture obsessed with fact-based journalism. As in Europe, much of the core material in reportage is statistical. Today is SuperBowl Sunday and the stats are coming down like dandruff, but I already wrote about Statsheets in the previous article so lets not go there. Instead, I have a copy of the Tennessean for 6 February in front of me. Lets try that.
First off, this is a good newspaper and nothing I say is intended to denigrate it. But the urge to “factualize” is all over it. Front page headline reads “Teaching immigrants is a growing challenge”. Apparently 22% of Metro Nashville public school students now need to learn English as a second language, compared to 15% in 2005. The city has, in an annual student enrolment of 78,000, 10.692 whose first language is Spanish, 1749 Arabic, 999 Kurdish, and more more and more breakdowns until we reach the Burmese and Karens at 169 and Amharic speakers at 154. Think this is a naturally statistical story? Lets go to the local news section whose arresting headline is “Execution Drug Options Limited”. Here we learn that Tennessee has 86 inmates on death row but only enough drugs to execute 8 of them. The pre-fatal injection anesthetic sodium thiopental is not now made in the US, so State governments are having to use veterinary anesthetics or buy the drug covertly in Europe – a dealer based in a British driving school offices in London is intriguingly mentioned in this connection…
But I am getting carried away. The point is that the core “Facts” of the narrative in these stories is based on the figures, and that is where Narrative Science (http://www.narrativescience.com/) comes in. As I was writing my first story this company announced a $6 million funding round led by Battery Ventures. The company was founded by a group whose experience includes Google, Doubleclick, and computing and journalism at Northeastern at Evanston, Ill. Their idea is to take all those fact-based stories and turn the facts into computer-based narrative, create templates around their recurrence and generate a new story with each update. Employment statistics, oil production, share price movements, population change etc etc. We are constantly comparing this quarter to last, or to the same last year, or to the best or worst in the last 5, 10 or 50 years. Where these are recurrent interests a computer can write them very effectively – and, a cynic would say, is more likely to report them accurately.
And the implications of this are immense, and were brought home to me by a casual conversation last week with the digital director of a leading B2B player. He is a Narrative Science triallist and his service is due to be launched during February. He noted both the very rapid need for updates in terms of market stats in his sector, as well as the fact that standard conventions around comparisons meant that these stories were ideal for computerized updates. These too were stories that needed to be squirted quickly onto mobile platforms – comment could follow later once everyone had the core narrative. He then alluded to the cost savings and the annual cost of journalists. I walked away with the idea in mind that the critical path to saving B2B as advertising fails to return will be a massive change in the cost base of the industry. Ironically, efforts to create a new computerized journalism at Northeastern may well end in the employment of less journalists, though those who are needed will be needed at a much higher level of intellectual input.
Finally, a footnote on the conference. My panel of B2B players were all stars (Mason Slaine, Clare Hart and Scott Schulman) but outside of them I was very taken with David Liu, CEO of the Knot and the two founders of Gilt Groupe: B2C is certainly coming into its own. But the session that made me most thoughtful was an Interview with David Levin, the CEO of UBM. His intellectually rigorous approach to a careful acquisition and disposal programme was very admirable. But is the old niche-based B2B model still available? I see Thomson Reuters creating an increasingly cross-sectoral approach as they build bridges between legal, tax and regulatory on the one hand and financial services on the other. Instead of unrelated niches are we going back to cross-selling related sectors to get growth leverage? And if we are is the Informa/UBM/EMAP model beginning to creak as these players have too little in any one niche to effectively cross-sell? Depends how you define sector and niche, of course, but we could be in line for another age of Happy Families card game swaps, aka vertical sector consolidation.
Dec
19
News Not Fit to Print
Filed Under Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized | 4 Comments
One of the themes of this year has been the wearisome regularity with which the “news” comes up as a topic of conversation at conferences and fora. It seems that every audience contains a voice, half-defensive, half angry, asking why people have a down on newspapers, claiming that they will always be needed, and indicating that they have changed and are adapting wonderfully to the networked world. I am not the only one with a wonky view of reality. So I am writing today to those who still appear to think, as one UK national newspaper proprietor once said to me, “that we must expect a time when everyone gets over this digital fascination”. And my message is simple: all print and broadcast news media will survive for as long as their idea of periodicity equates with the demands of their users. When they get out of step in terms of time, the end is nigh.
One of the greatest drivers of news used to be what was happening in the financial markets. The day has long passed when you could read that over your breakfast and then react, but lets go over and see what is happening in the fast lane. Selerity (www.seleritycorp.com) is a wonderful case study. Here ex Thomson Reuters people are building an actionable news service using what they undramatically call “low latency event data”. In other words they take Quantitative News from corporate announcements, retailers’ sales performance statements, or car sales releases and they squeeze it down the network in micro seconds so that when it hits pre-progammed, rule-based automated equity trading systems instant decisions can be made and actioned. My guess is that machine readable news will soon dominate the financial markets where that news can be reduced to market data, and that over time it will be possible to add more and more “sentiment ” into this news-stream, and react to that within the algorithmic trading approach.
Over at Alacra they are well down this track in one sense, since their PulsePro technology (http://pulse.alacra.com/pulse-solutions), with some 3000 sources, reads and scores the blogs and commentaries of pundits, traders, journalists (but hopefully not me) in order to create programmatic trading based on a sentiment score. Slower of course, but still a way of generating news and applying it to decisions before any of the existing players are awake. And this type of feed will have its echo in other walks of life. Monitoring blogs, where Factiva was a pioneer in its headier days, has morphed into Corporate Reputation Management. The argument is that by the time the bloggers have finished with a topic and it reaches the media, it is too late to put things right, so the successors of the PR agencies are into pre-emptive monitoring ( do they even read those carefully automated news clipping files – except to put them into the client report!). In truth, news has moved upstream, and companies like www.infegy.com are beginning to build news businesses there.
And when we get really clever we will use the technology to write the news as well as reading and reacting to them. Over, then, to StatSheet, a start-up player in the fielsd of sports reporting. In the statistics fest which is US college football and basketball, this company has built a niche called StatSheet Network which in turn creates a newsite for each team (currently 345 NCAA Division 1 men’s basketball teams). This adds in all the latest game statistics from each team, and then provides narratives and analysis as a form of robotic news development. For smaller teams with little infrastructure, this is clearly a godsend (http://statsheet.com/#websites).
Some newspapers may re-invent themselves online, and sometimes (as with the UK’s MailOnline, its online presence will take on a life of its own and become very distinct from its real world form and meaning. A few years back I was more confident of this. Now I wonder. It seemed to me then that it would be non-trivial but possible to create micro-news publishing and re-invent the local press. Now I feel that the format and business model of the newspaper world make it impossible for those immersed in that world to see enough of what is going on around them to start again in a new place. Only new players with unclouded minds can do that. If you can analyse need and come up with solutions that do not necessarily need journalists, or sub-editors, or even feature writers then you are beginning to think again. I see little evidence that our press are doing that.
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