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Journalists are not loosing their jobs due to automation. They are losing their jobs due to the greed of their corporate masters - who value profit over deliver

Journalists are not loosing their jobs due to automation. They are losing their jobs due to the greed of their corporate masters - who value profit over delivering news that can be trusted. Being a real journalist is a far more creative work then being a programmer. Especially in fields like investigative journalism - you must be a 100,000X programmer if you think you can replace Glenn Greenwald with a bot.

vtlynch 11y ago
Agreed. Journalism is one job that robots will never replace. Even if software eventually could, what company would write it.
- prawn 11y ago
  A company looking to save on staff costs or to sell to another who wants the same?
- natrius 11y ago
  https://www.narrativescience.com/ https://www.narrativescience.com/
skybrian 11y ago
You say it's greed but worrying about profitability isn't optional, particularly when revenues decline as much as they have been in the newspaper industry. When customers stop paying, fewer journalists have jobs.
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  Well, if you go into the job of selling information, and all you have for sale is a bunch of lies salted with a few low quality non-threatening truths, the weird thing is that anybody pays for it, not that you are getting out of job. The greedy non-news model predates the internet for a long while. The internet just brought some competition.
jonsen 11y ago
Journalists are not loosing their jobs due to automation. Well, the robots don't buy newspapers.
protomyth 11y ago
> Being a real journalist is a far more creative work then being a programmer At this point, there should be a name for "No True Scotsman" applied to creativity. I have a tough time seeing the comparison between someone reporting what actually went on to someone creating wholly new things. I actually don't want creativity in my journalists or historians. I want ethics and fact checking.
- dannycodes 11y ago
  Reporting what actually went on is an act of creation. Any good story requires detective work, something that is based a lot on intuition, interpersonal communication, and lateral thinking. These skills are not easy to automate. Also, you'll never get the complete story, some guesswork and logic is required to fill in the holes and deliver a cohesive narrative. So in that sense you'd need quite the impressive program to uncover the truth behind, for example, watergate.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    I am surely not one arguing robots, etc. can do a reporter's job better than a person. No, what I am arguing is this continued BS of who is creative is basically a "No True Scotsman" commentary. On the other hand, I am very little impressed by the quality of what passes for journalism and am pretty confident that a computer could write much of what I see with better fact checking. Very much like CASE tools of old were used to write programs. At least a robot might be programmed with the courtesy to quote the whole thought and not make cuts that can be attacked or change the meaning. As to the narrative, too many journalists write their articles as if they were pundits defending their beliefs and "trying to change the world". It is great to be engaging and write something that interests people, but leave the punditry for the political campaigns.
cwyers 11y ago
Sure they are, it's just not their work being replaced - it's the printing press. Journalism used to be a loss leader for the real revenue making activities of the newspaper press, advertising. The most profitable were the classified ads and car ads. Well, Craigslist gutted classifieds, and a combination of services have supplanted car ads in newsprint.

vtlynch 11y ago

Agreed. Journalism is one job that robots will never replace. Even if software eventually could, what company would write it.

prawn 11y ago
A company looking to save on staff costs or to sell to another who wants the same?
natrius 11y ago
https://www.narrativescience.com/ https://www.narrativescience.com/

skybrian 11y ago

You say it's greed but worrying about profitability isn't optional, particularly when revenues decline as much as they have been in the newspaper industry. When customers stop paying, fewer journalists have jobs.

marcosdumay 11y ago
Well, if you go into the job of selling information, and all you have for sale is a bunch of lies salted with a few low quality non-threatening truths, the weird thing is that anybody pays for it, not that you are getting out of job. The greedy non-news model predates the internet for a long while. The internet just brought some competition.

jonsen 11y ago

Journalists are not loosing their jobs due to automation. Well, the robots don't buy newspapers.

protomyth 11y ago

> Being a real journalist is a far more creative work then being a programmer At this point, there should be a name for "No True Scotsman" applied to creativity. I have a tough time seeing the comparison between someone reporting what actually went on to someone creating wholly new things. I actually don't want creativity in my journalists or historians. I want ethics and fact checking.

dannycodes 11y ago
Reporting what actually went on is an act of creation. Any good story requires detective work, something that is based a lot on intuition, interpersonal communication, and lateral thinking. These skills are not easy to automate. Also, you'll never get the complete story, some guesswork and logic is required to fill in the holes and deliver a cohesive narrative. So in that sense you'd need quite the impressive program to uncover the truth behind, for example, watergate.
- protomyth 11y ago
  I am surely not one arguing robots, etc. can do a reporter's job better than a person. No, what I am arguing is this continued BS of who is creative is basically a "No True Scotsman" commentary. On the other hand, I am very little impressed by the quality of what passes for journalism and am pretty confident that a computer could write much of what I see with better fact checking. Very much like CASE tools of old were used to write programs. At least a robot might be programmed with the courtesy to quote the whole thought and not make cuts that can be attacked or change the meaning. As to the narrative, too many journalists write their articles as if they were pundits defending their beliefs and "trying to change the world". It is great to be engaging and write something that interests people, but leave the punditry for the political campaigns.

cwyers 11y ago

Sure they are, it's just not their work being replaced - it's the printing press. Journalism used to be a loss leader for the real revenue making activities of the newspaper press, advertising. The most profitable were the classified ads and car ads. Well, Craigslist gutted classifieds, and a combination of services have supplanted car ads in newsprint.