Quartz is looking to use computers more in reporting

Quartz is looking to incorporate computers more in the reporting of those articles, reports Tim Peterson of Digiday.

Peterson writes, “Quartz has formed the Quartz AI Studio to produce articles that use machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence that trains computers to identify patterns and anomalies and otherwise analyze data, to assist in the reporting of those articles, such as by separating the signal from the noise in terabytes of data in a fraction of the time that it would take a team of humans to comb through them.

“Similar to the Quartz Bot Studio, which was established in November 2016 to develop chatbots and apps for conversational interfaces like Facebook’s Messenger and Amazon’s Alexa, the formation of the publication’s AI outfit stems from a Knight Foundation grant. Quartz will use the $249,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to hire a developer and a producer to join the Quartz AI Studio alongside John Keefe, technical architect for bots and machine learning at Quartz. Quartz expects to make those hires in time to begin working on stories in January, said Keefe.

“‘Artificial intelligence has the potential to have a transformative impact on the ways in which journalists share and spread the news. The Quartz AI Studio will hone this opportunity, putting artificial intelligence reporting methods into the hands of more journalists and helping small and mid-size news organizations increase their capacity to innovate,’ said Paul Cheung, Knight Foundation director for journalism and technology innovation, in an emailed statement.”

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