Robot Journalism – We should not be afraid

Robot journalism or automation is becoming an important part of news production. It speeds up news production and generates a vast amount of content in a matter of sector to be distributed and consumed in print and online. However, we know little about how news automation work and its implication on ethics and quality of journalism, as well as the impact on human journalists.

These questions were explored in a workshop organized by the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) within the framework of the Media Road project on 5 June in Lisbon, Portugal. The workshop was attended by around 40 participants from across Europe, including journalists, academics, media and journalists’ representatives.

Experts on robot journalism, journalists, developers, media managers and academics participated in the three panels discussion focusing on: the production and application of robot journalism, the impact on the working conditions of journalists and the ethical issues surrounding robot journalism.

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Robot journalism – Shall we be afraid?

Should we be afraid of robot journalism? Belgian journalist, Laurence Dierickx, has just dedicated her thesis on this question at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) asked her to share the result of her research which highlights the ability of robots in producing objective, accurate and comprehensive news stories, however, they may not be as readable those written by real journalists. Here is her article and we guarantee you that this one was not written by a robot.

 

Automatically generated content in the natural language (General Architecture for Text Engineering), which is a branch of the natural language processing (NLP), has been widely deployed in Europe when the French departmental elections took place on 22 March 2015. During the election coverage, more than 30,000 has been produced by robots by Le Monde in partnership with the Parisian start-up Syllabs.

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