ISOJ 2012

1. Human-assisted reporting
How to create robot reporters in your own image
Art by Mark S. Fisher

2. http://lat.ms/robotreporters
All URLs available at

3. How we act now
Photo: ThomasHawk
Your
computer
You

4. Your computer Your computer
The story
How it ought to be

5. You

6. Here's when it hit me

7. That's news!!!

8. Teach me how to Dougie!

9. Find a simple, repetitive and moving data stream

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

11. Train it to answer the questions you would ask
- What has happened lately?
- 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!
You again

12. This doesn't have to be complicated

13. Train the system to send you alerts

14. Make a dashboard to drilldown

15. Train it to write a nut graf...

16. ...which comes out like this.

17. WHAT DO I GET OUT OF IT?

18. BREAKING NEWS

19. A WAY AROUND PIOs

20. INSTANT ANALYSIS

22. AUTOMATED COPY

26. - Election results
- Home sales
- Money in politics
- Legislatures
- Court filings
- 990 forms
- Sports results
- SEC filings
- Environmental data
- Crime reports, arrests, etc.
- Gov't inspections
- Gas prices
- Gov't contracting
- Stock tickers
OPPORTUNITIES

27. PEOPLE DOING THIS

30. “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

31. TOO LATE, DUDE

32. BE CAREFUL
WHAT YOU BUILD!

33. What's wrong with this picture?
Santa Monica
Downtown
South L.A.

34. http://lat.ms/robotreporters
All URLs available at
THANK YOU!
Ben Welsh
I am
@palewire, @LATdatadesk
Follow me at