Welcome our new robo-journalist overlords

My second email newsletter discusses robo-journalists, for some an object of job-based fear. However, based on trying out Automated Insight’s natural language generation system Wordsmith and following Kent Brockman I for one welcome our new robo-journalist overlords; although that’s because I reckon they will be human.

A preview:

The main things I learnt was that (at least for now) robo-journalism needs spreadsheets to turn into stories and considerable human work is required to set things up: choosing which pieces of data go where, what words or phrases to use under certain conditions and what random synonyms work to add variety.

I think natural language generation has a lot of potential for the media, but will actually create new opportunities for (human) journalists with skills in wrangling data, editing and programming.

The newsletter also includes links to articles I’ve written and ones I like and February’s map of month. I produced this from the latest ONS workplace gross-value added figures for London’s boroughs, which cover 2014. The City of London and Camden have a GVA/person of £263,789, more than 10 times the UK average. Meanwhile, Waltham Forest and Redbridge are more than a third below the average at just £15,833.

London workplace gross-value added 2014

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