Feb
6
Robotic Journalism and Death Row
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
I am still rolling across America, in a journey last week from San Diego to New York (again) for the DeSilva+Phillips Media Dealmakers Summit at the Pierre, and now on to Nashville, Tennessee. More below on the conference, but first back to a theme started in my blog “News not fit to Print”. I am becoming obsessed with the science around automated story development, and now see it everywhere I look. And everywhere I look I see a Western culture obsessed with fact-based journalism. As in Europe, much of the core material in reportage is statistical. Today is SuperBowl Sunday and the stats are coming down like dandruff, but I already wrote about Statsheets in the previous article so lets not go there. Instead, I have a copy of the Tennessean for 6 February in front of me. Lets try that.
First off, this is a good newspaper and nothing I say is intended to denigrate it. But the urge to “factualize” is all over it. Front page headline reads “Teaching immigrants is a growing challenge”. Apparently 22% of Metro Nashville public school students now need to learn English as a second language, compared to 15% in 2005. The city has, in an annual student enrolment of 78,000, 10.692 whose first language is Spanish, 1749 Arabic, 999 Kurdish, and more more and more breakdowns until we reach the Burmese and Karens at 169 and Amharic speakers at 154. Think this is a naturally statistical story? Lets go to the local news section whose arresting headline is “Execution Drug Options Limited”. Here we learn that Tennessee has 86 inmates on death row but only enough drugs to execute 8 of them. The pre-fatal injection anesthetic sodium thiopental is not now made in the US, so State governments are having to use veterinary anesthetics or buy the drug covertly in Europe – a dealer based in a British driving school offices in London is intriguingly mentioned in this connection…
But I am getting carried away. The point is that the core “Facts” of the narrative in these stories is based on the figures, and that is where Narrative Science (http://www.narrativescience.com/) comes in. As I was writing my first story this company announced a $6 million funding round led by Battery Ventures. The company was founded by a group whose experience includes Google, Doubleclick, and computing and journalism at Northeastern at Evanston, Ill. Their idea is to take all those fact-based stories and turn the facts into computer-based narrative, create templates around their recurrence and generate a new story with each update. Employment statistics, oil production, share price movements, population change etc etc. We are constantly comparing this quarter to last, or to the same last year, or to the best or worst in the last 5, 10 or 50 years. Where these are recurrent interests a computer can write them very effectively – and, a cynic would say, is more likely to report them accurately.
And the implications of this are immense, and were brought home to me by a casual conversation last week with the digital director of a leading B2B player. He is a Narrative Science triallist and his service is due to be launched during February. He noted both the very rapid need for updates in terms of market stats in his sector, as well as the fact that standard conventions around comparisons meant that these stories were ideal for computerized updates. These too were stories that needed to be squirted quickly onto mobile platforms – comment could follow later once everyone had the core narrative. He then alluded to the cost savings and the annual cost of journalists. I walked away with the idea in mind that the critical path to saving B2B as advertising fails to return will be a massive change in the cost base of the industry. Ironically, efforts to create a new computerized journalism at Northeastern may well end in the employment of less journalists, though those who are needed will be needed at a much higher level of intellectual input.
Finally, a footnote on the conference. My panel of B2B players were all stars (Mason Slaine, Clare Hart and Scott Schulman) but outside of them I was very taken with David Liu, CEO of the Knot and the two founders of Gilt Groupe: B2C is certainly coming into its own. But the session that made me most thoughtful was an Interview with David Levin, the CEO of UBM. His intellectually rigorous approach to a careful acquisition and disposal programme was very admirable. But is the old niche-based B2B model still available? I see Thomson Reuters creating an increasingly cross-sectoral approach as they build bridges between legal, tax and regulatory on the one hand and financial services on the other. Instead of unrelated niches are we going back to cross-selling related sectors to get growth leverage? And if we are is the Informa/UBM/EMAP model beginning to creak as these players have too little in any one niche to effectively cross-sell? Depends how you define sector and niche, of course, but we could be in line for another age of Happy Families card game swaps, aka vertical sector consolidation.
Jan
30
Someday, when I’m dreaming …
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, privacy, Publishing, Search, social media, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Apologies first for linking blog entries with song lyrics. Memo to Self – kick this silly habit. Response from Self – but your whole information behaviour is just a series of silly habits, so why quit a comparatively harmless one? (That’s the trouble with Self, I find. Such a smart ass. Makes the whole idea of an interior dialogue so pointless and frustrating.) But habitual information behaviours is not a subject to be given up lightly. The way we learn, absorb, research and find content contentment is intimately bound into habitual patterns of finding out, and some internet innovations work with those patterns – while others work radically against them. I remember returning from the US some years ago, newly signed into Twitter and LinkedIn, and wondering if these would ever become parts of my habitual behaviour, and, lo, it comes to pass that they are lungs through which I breathe. Yet I thought the innovation which would most change my life was going to be StumbleUpon, and I find that I have changed machines and not re-installed it.
So here I am, back in the US again (an experience that happens most months, admittedly) and once more we are in a firestorm of service innovation. During a trip which will take me to New York (twice), San Diego and Nashville, I find a constant reminder of the atmosphere around the internet boom of the early years of this century – and the way it continued despite the dotcom bust. I heard an investor yesterday talking about the “new bubble”, while governments and bankers are still meeting to resolve the last one (whose predecessor was the one whose subsequent regulatory adjustment would bring to an end, in our lifetimes and forever, the cycle of boom and bust…)
So what will this round of hyper-invested, hyper-hyped internet launches do to my habitual behaviours? Quite a bit, perhaps. I have now encountered three, new to me as a user, which could fit that category. I am sure they will be familiar to many of you already, but here are some random reactions from a new user:
- I was really impressed by Qwiki (www.qwiki.com). Loved the Vimeo. delighted to see the return of Dr Louis Monier of AltaVista fame. I have signed up to the Alpha because it seems to me that the idea of defining topics and people in short clips, and then turning them into audio as well as text and maps and video equates very well with the way people learn, and with the demands of mobile access. If you are English, enter the topic “Eustace Folville” and you will see what I mean. If this catches on then it becomes an instant referencing point for learning processes. At present the charming American computerized voice lacks all pronunciation skills, but the service does answer the teacher who said to me at BETT that “my kids are too lazy and don’t read well enough to copy Wikipedia”! And if you are a Publisher and reading this blog, go straight to the “For Publishers” section on this site: you have around a day to decide whether you catch at the new bandwagon – or not!
- I shall certainly use www.unsubscribe.com to hoover away all of the persistent marketeers who still litter my email with unwanted marketing messages. Yes, you know who you are! Toner Giant, the Kiawah Island marketing department and others! I have tried to unsubscribe but you seem not to hear. Now we have a service that will message you back until you desist, and remove you from my inbox. I can do as many of you as I like for $20 a year, and the whole thing works on a downloaded extension to the email client which produces an “unsubscribe” button alongside each email. The internet world creates its own vices and compensates with its own correctives (the founder calls his service “email hygienics”). In October they raised $2.1 million in a funding round led by Charles River Ventures.
- And I would love Spokeo (www.spokeo.com) to work – and globally. I know that it will recreate the privacy wars , and that what it does is probably illegal in most of Europe, but I think that we all want to be able to work in a directory context where we enter one piece of information and get all the others in terms of directory access. How often I lack an email address, and even the invaluable LinkedIn cannot help, or urgently need a street address, or a location map, or to know which email address is current. I am often less concerned about social network membership, personal wealth, or photos and videos showing the individual on the web. But Spokeo searches and combines all this, and frighteningly well in the US, so that if I resided here I would want to be able to specify exactly what connections it made, especially between personal and business connectors. But what it is doing is something that the phone companies never managed to do online, and it is a solution, again, which fits a mobile access world like a glove. And £2.95 per month.
My previous generation having reached maturity with the LinkedIn IPO last week, I shall be interested to see how this new generation fares. Qwiki may be the StumbleUpon of my new crop, of course, but I would not bet upon it. Service innovation succeeds on the network because specific behavioural requirements are met, because service pricing and conditions of use are appropriate and because users recognize its place in their own personal “workflow” of active transactional engagement with the world around them. All that and something else too – they must feel good using it and feel that others think they look good as a result. Get to that last homebase as well and services score. I shall watch my new trio like a hawk!
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