[LINK] Move over Rupert... #5 is alive and after your job...

[tomk]

Oh dear... factual reporting without the unwelcome "opinion".
(Probably funded by Skunkworks at Google HQ).

Quote/
Automation’s next frontier: journalism

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/business-brains/automations-next-frontier-journalism/26027

By Joe McKendrick | September 2, 2012, 12:24 PM PDT


Would you trust a story written by a machine? You may have already read 
some machine-generated content without realizing it. (Not this post, 
however.)

Many newspapers already have applications that gather sports scores and 
feeds them into legible, machine-generated articles on the latest games. 
Now, a startup is ready to take this technology to the next step — 
financial reporting and beyond.

MarketWatch’s Tom Bemis reports on a startup that markets a solution 
that converts streams of data into readable articles:

“By feeding a set of numbers through its systems, the two-year-old 
Narrative Science can generate stories in English that can explain the 
data from charts, graphs and spreadsheets to their customers… One 
straightforward application is ‘looking at point-of-sale data for a 
franchise organization … or any organization that has corporate 
headquarters and individual outlets,’ [says Kristian Hammond, CTO and 
co-founder of Narrative Science.]

Narrative Science’s artificial intelligence platform, Quill, is 
“designed to understands the stories it writes, independent of the 
structure and language in which it expresses them. As a result, it can 
use the same set of ideas to generate stories in multiple formats, from 
long-form stories to PDF’s to business reports to Tweets. Quill also 
understands the relative importance of the elements within a single 
story and across multiple stories.”

The value proposition isn’t replacing human writers, but actually 
enabling the writing of stories targeted at extremely small audiences — 
where paying a writer wouldn’t make economic sense anyway. “The place 
where it’s most powerful is where we have an audience of one,”/Quote