Comment by jonnathanson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonnathanson | Hacker News Reader

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There are three areas of journalism I see as relatively "safe" from bots for the foreseeable future:

1) Big-picture Op/Ed (of the kind you're talking about)

2) Investigation (of the deep, involved, I-need-to-know-where-to-start, I-need-to-get-people-to-talk variety)

3) Narrative nonfiction (profiles, colorful takes on a subject; see: The New Yorker, Michael Lewis, etc.)

The interesting thing is that each of these domains could be enhanced by the use of better software. And that's the best way to start looking at bot-fueled journalism. I'd love a machine-based fact checker for my pieces. I'd love AI-driven help with compiling and analyzing data. I'd love to outsource the high-frequency grunt work to a machine, just as it's done in many other industries. It would give me more time to think. It would let me focus where my focus matters. Instead of spending 99% of my time chasing raw research, and 1% of my time scrambling to assemble the piece, I could get more data, better, faster, up front, and thus put deeper thought into the analysis.

On that note: the journalists who thrive in the machine age will be the ones who understand what the machine is doing. Data-literacy is already a big, differentiating factor in the market now. Statistical competency will be very important, and the bar for competency will be positioned higher every few years. Beautiful logic will trump beautiful fluff.

This will accelerate the bimodal shake-out of journalism that we're already starting to see. We'll have base, commodified, LCD-pandering content farms on one end, and deep thought on the other. Quantity shops and quality shops, both of them improved by the automation of certain functions. Anyone in the middle ground is in trouble. This will be a good thing for both poles -- provided we can find a way to make the economics of quality work as well as those of quantity.

Interesting—is there something small and replicable that a piece of software could help you do right away?

Also, I lump 1) and 3) together in my mind as not-quite-objective, analytic content, but I admit that was poorly expressed.

"is there something small and replicable that a piece of software could help you do right away?"

Fact checking is a huge problem. I'm not sure if call it a hair-on-fire problem. But it's certainly pissed me off on any number of occasions. Typically, what happens is that I'll write a story mildly critical of BigCo. The PR department at BigCo will catch wind of it, then email me and my editor with as many small "corrections" as they can muster, in an attempt to take down the piece.

When I say corrections, I don't mean broad facts. I mean infinitesimally perceptible technicalities. For instance, I might report someone's title as the "VP of Strategy," because that's what's listed on this company's website and on the person's LinkedIn page. But the company's PR group will come at me, screaming bloody murder, because the guy's title is actually "VP of Strategic Initiatives." They'll do this because they're unhappy with the broader criticism I'm leveling against their business -- so they want to pick away at as many nits as possible. It's a guerilla harassment tactic.

Now, you might well ask: aren't I just being sloppy? How hard can it be to fact check everything? The answer is: it's damned near impossible to catch everything. Some of this information is conflicting across multiple sources. Some of it's out of date or inaccurate. And some of it's not even publicly available, and you wouldn't know you're slightly off until someone corrects you. (Case in point: the "Strategic Initiative" example, a nonsensically titled internal promotion that was never made public.) Add to this the immense pressure of weekly deadlines, and factor in how much time I need to spend ideating, researching, writing, and editing in the first place, and you see how little time I have to get every last thing 100% accurate. I'd love to be 100% accurate 100% of the time, but given my constraints, that's rarely feasible. It's like asking an engineer to write flawless, bug-free code at a hackathon.

I'd love a piece of software I could run my stories through, which would analyze my piece against a public data set (Google, for instance) to check for factual accuracy in all these little places. Or at least a piece of software that would throw up red flags on unverified statements, for which multiple, conflicting data exists on the web. Sort of like the little, red underlines on automatic spell check.

Perhaps that's not a big enough use case or TAM. But broaden it out. I'd love a better way to compile Google research about any given query. This is why I'm rooting for the stuff Wolfram is working on, though I'd love a more modifiable and specialized front end for professional users.

Really interesting. Complicated, but really interesting.

Yeah, by no means an easy problem to solve. But I think better research tools, in general, are an interesting area. Search engines are beautiful things, but their output is limited by your input. They can't necessarily help you with the things you didn't know to look for in the first place. In a way, a search process is a very deterministic, almost teleological one. I believe there is room in the market for a more focused, yet more open-ended research methodology.

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