Cranking out one buzzfeed-grade article a day doesn't seem like much work.
I'm pretty sure I've already put more thought into this comment than they put into most of their articles.
I'm pretty sure I've already put more thought into this comment than they put into most of their articles.
The underlying data are available, the vocabulary is distinctly limited, and the reporting was already highly pro-forma. Mad-libbing a few variants of language and selecting the best of the lot does work fairly well.
That actually raises the underlying question: why publish narrative copy at all in cases such as this, rather than data tables or charts? News and journalism are curiously allergic to data or presenting it in a usable fashion -- I've seen tables essentially written out over several paragraphs that could have been expressed in a few grid squares.