Nicholas D. Allen

Jon Pyle at True/Slant thinks we are attempting the impossible.  FanIQ dissents asking, “Do you ever read a game recap in the newspaper and say to yourself, ‘Man, a robot could totally do something like this.’”  Additional coverage:

“‘StatsMonkey’ eliminates the need for a humanoid to actually attend a sporting event, instead mashing together the statistics into a basic by-the-numbers account of a game.”

-10 Things You Didn’t Know About Baylor, Columbia Missourian

-Robot Reporters, -Hartford Courant

-Blogging Robot to Make Sportwriters (More) Obsolete, -SB Nation

-Generation J, Chicago Tribune

“Now, a group of deluded killjoys from Northwestern University are trying to finish the argument. This week, they announced the completion of a program called Stats Monkey that generates its own game stories using box scores and play-by-play info.”

-Can a computer cover a ball game?, Toronto Star

“We know what you’re all thinking: yeah, but do Stats Monkey stories stink?  We wish.”

-Sportswriters going ape. And monkeying around…, The Sport Jesters

“Welcome to the future, where the umpires might not be killer robots just yet, but the sportswriters already sport electronic brains.”

-Storied legacy of sportswriting passed to robot stat monkeys, Yahoo Sports

“Only as much one can state with security: It will come. The rising costs in the media will already provide for it.”

-Journalism: Now also from text modules of colleague the automat, Carta

The Robots Are Coming! Oh, They’re Here, New York Times

Algorithm Writes Sports Stories Without Human Intervention, NBC Chicago

Hardy Vision: Not OK, computer — the sportswriter strikes back, CBS Sports

It looks like the Obama Justice Department will be scrutinizing mergers more closely than their predecessors. The first high-profile case looks to be the proposed Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger.

The Journal presents the merger to be primarily about vertical integration, which it is, however as far as I can tell Live Nation also a ticket retailer. That would make the merger also have horizontal implications.

Of course I am much more concerned about the telecomm sector, where I would like to see data delivery services separated from content delivery.

An intriguing suggestion at the Online Journalism Review

Insist that reporters have either professional or academic expertise in the beat that they cover. Simply knowing such sources isn’t good enough anymore, not with professionals having direct access to the public through blogs and discussion forums. Journalists must have the expertise to help the reader sort the accurate from the incorrect. If all we do is repeating what others say, readers won’t need us anymore. They can use Google and social media to find those sources for themselves.

I’m reminded of the saying about getting help fitting shoes in a department store.  The person selling you shoes probably worked in appliances last week.

from Knight Digital Media Center Online Journalism Review, via Romenesko

E-mail remains a great way to communicate with readers who prefer that medium. Many readers love to get regular updates on what is available on a website, so that they can keep in touch no matter whether they’re able to check the site on their own or not. And e-mail’s also an excellent choice to let readers know about enterprise stories or other exclusives that the news organization is breaking.

But doing as Buttry described, and sending a “breaking news alert” hours after everyone from Helsinki to Honolulu has been tweeting the news just embarrasses the news organization. There’s no better way to reinforce the message, “Hi, just to remind you: We’re clueless and slow!”

More broadly, news is all about putting you in-touch with the world.  If you look out of touch with how people use technology, it sends a bad message about your news brand.

This is also why links are so important.  Links in some case literaly put people in touch with the news.  Failing to link is incredibly destructive to media brands.  Failure to recognize this will destroy news outlets.

In which I present my master’s project at Medill, computer generated baseball stories, and several other very cool projects are presented.  The stories are available on writeclick.org.

My master’s program gets a write-up in Time.

I’m looking for some CC licensed images for a project today, so I thought I would see if Microsoft’s new Bing engine could help.  Like the interface, but I haven’t seen any CC search yet.  Jury is still out on relevancy of results.

Fellow Medillian John Templon and I were contemplating the best way to take automatically geo-tagged photos a few days back.  As it happens, I serendipitously came upon a New York Times Frugal Traveler post on that very subject today.