Automated news is a journalistic product that is generally understood as the automated generation of journalistic material through software and algorithms, without any human intervention except for the initial programming. While some media organisations made the choice to outsource the production of automated news to external content providers or decided to build their own in-house systems, the ±«Óãtv picked an alternate way as it subscribed to an online platform, Arria Studio, which lets journalists design their own templates for automated news.
This paper describes five experiments with automated news conducted at the ±«Óãtv in 2019, then detail the general direction that the broadcaster seems to have taken with regard to this type of product, and finally touch on the reconfiguration of journalistic roles that their design and implementation call for.
Key findings:
- The ±«Óãtv resorted to a structured journalism approach when delineating baseline scenarios for automated news, but to a human-in-the-loop system when handling edge cases, which included dealing with the particular requirements of the 2019 general election in the United Kingdom.
- When working out baseline scenarios, journalists could learn how to better engage with concepts of abstraction that are at the core of structured journalism by envisioning first what an ideal story would look like, and then breaking it down into smaller elements that can be reusable across many versions of that same story.
- However, when dealing with edge cases as part of a human-in-the-loop configuration, journalists need to be cautious not to add too many extra details to the story and fall behind schedule.
- The design and implementation of automated news call for a reconfiguration of journalistic roles, first to address issues that relate to data quality and interpretation, then to set up algorithmic rules so as to embed the organisation’s values into their conception.
- On the data side, journalists should be encouraged to perform a sort of 'quality control' over the data they are using and to think critically before arranging data pieces together as part of a process known as 'building the story model.'
- On the processing side, setting up algorithmic rules for automated news illustrates the need for further discussions around how to embed editorial standards, journalistic codes of conduct and linguistic aspects into a programmatic language.
- This report brings forward the need to reflect on new guidance for journalism practice, which would take all the computational aspects raised by the deployment of automated news into account.
- At the ±«Óãtv, this could translate into a set of 'computational journalism guidelines' that would take inspiration from the ±«Óãtv’s Editorial Standards and Values, but also from the fairness, accountability, confidentiality, transparency and safety in information retrieval framework that is currently being developed as part of the ±«Óãtv’s Machine Learning Engine Principles.
Samuel Danzon-Chambaud of Dublin City University wrote this paper.
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