How Bloomberg is using computers to tell stories

Tom Macauley of ComputerWorld writes about how Bloomberg News journalists are using computer programs to find stories.

Macauley writes, “Bloomberg News today often relies on the combined efforts of humans and machines. Individual tasks are often automated but there are very few jobs without a human contribution.

“‘We produce automated news, but even more than that we do a lot of human-computer hybrid stories,’ says Mann. ‘The computer will come up with a first story and then a journalist will take it and elaborate it, put it into context, and explain the whole narrative act.

“‘The computer will have fairly simple heuristics; it’ll look for major shifts or deviations. The people who are writing these programmes are a mix of journalists and computer scientists, so they use their editorial decision to say whenever anything like this happens is of interest, and then a person comes in and moulds it and forms it.’

“Journalists can initially be sceptical about the influence of automation, but this changes when they realise the benefits to their work.”

Read more here.