Human-assisted reporting

How to create robot reporters in your own image
Art by Mark S. Fisher

All URLs available at

http://lat.ms/robotreporters

How we act now
You
Your
computer

Photo: ThomasHawk

The story

Your computer

Your computer

How it ought to be

You

Here's when it hit me

That's news!!!

Teach me how to Dougie!

Find a simple, repetitive and moving data stream

Do standard pull and parse, but put it on loop.

- What has happened lately?

You again

- What is trending in short term?
- What is typical over long term?
- What are the outliers?
- How do entities compare?
- Have newsmakers been active?
- What matches other data sets?
- Answer me! I'm a newspaperman!

Train it to answer the questions you would ask

This doesn't have to be complicated

Train the system to send you alerts

Make a dashboard to drilldown

Train it to write a nut graf...

...which comes out like this.

WHAT DO I GET OUT OF IT?

BREAKING NEWS

A WAY AROUND PIOs

INSTANT ANALYSIS

AUTOMATED COPY

OPPORTUNITIES
- Election results

- SEC filings

- Home sales

- Environmental data

- Money in politics

- Crime reports, arrests, etc.

- Legislatures

- Gov't inspections

- Court filings

- Gas prices

- 990 forms

- Gov't contracting

- Sports results

- Stock tickers

PEOPLE DOING THIS

“In five years, a computer
program will win a
Pulitzer Prize — and I’ll
be damned if it’s not our
technology.”
- Kris Hammond to The New York Times

TOO LATE, DUDE

BE CAREFUL
WHAT YOU BUILD!

Downtown
Santa Monica

South L.A.

What's wrong with this picture?

THANK YOU!
I am

Ben Welsh
Follow me at

@palewire, @LATdatadesk
All URLs available at

http://lat.ms/robotreporters