#newsbots

[mrshamill]

The important news today was a very public fight between candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination Tulsi Gabbard and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but the story is not...

A very, very VERY important post. Please read.

[marklyndersay]

Journalism 2017: Rethinking the newsroom

Journalism 2017: Rethinking the newsroom

Above: It’s time to pick up the mic and define a new way of spreading the news. Photo by Mihajlo Maricic/DepositPhotos.

BitDepth#1103 for July 25, 2017

Let’s say it right up front. Modus operandi is killing modern journalism.

Journalism in T&T is still done the same way it was done ten years, even forty years ago, just with different gear.

A way of doing things can be ruthlessly sticky.

Journalis…

View On WordPress

[botwatch]

Why the Washington Post is building chatbots to deliver the news

The Washington Post is developing a news bot to act as a virtual reporter. 

  Chatbots have intrigued digital and old-school publishers, who recognize a growing audience on messaging apps. But with temptation comes a whole new set of complexities. For one: How do you build a useful bot that won’t go rogue and damage a publisher’s credibility?

The Washington Post is one of many big-name publishers developing such a news bot, and so far it’s just known internally as the WaPo bot, according to Joey Marburger, director of product at the newspaper. His team, which includes two engineers, is building the bot as more messaging apps open to such third-party experiences. Kik is launching a bot store today, and Facebook is getting ready to launch a bot store on Messenger, at its F8 conference next week, according to sources.

“We’re not going to have an algorithmic conversation learning bot that starts to create its own identity from nowhere, so we avoid that Microsoft Tay debacle,” Marburger said. “But we do want it to have a personality and tone, so we will give it that. That should really be the tone and personality of the Washington Post, to a certain extent. So it’s got to be able to handle some basic conversation but not in the way of tricking it into denying the Holocaust.” ...

All publishers are now having to decide on the services they could provide through the bots, how they might fit the brand, and then how to monetize their content. The Post wants a chatbot that can talk with readers and research news, answering their need for information. In some ways, it will act like a reporter, Marburger said.

“It could have explicit commands like, ‘Do this,’ but it can also be open-ended commands like, ‘What’s the latest on Donald Trump?’ And it should be able to provide that information to you,” Marburger said. “It won’t maintain your calendar or help you with tracking packages or things like that. It’s got to do what people would expect the Washington Post to do for them.”

Read full story here.

[botwatch]

Listen To The Premise Podcast, Episode 2, Rise Of The Bots

In Forbes' new podcast, Bruce Upbin and Parmy Olson chats about the rise of bots as virtual assistants.

Messaging is the new medium. Believe it or not, people spend more time chatting on apps like WeChat, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Kik than they do on social networks. Sensing the shift, businesses globally are starting to connect with customers through text chat (something the Chinese already do en masse). This is not a job humans can keep up with easily, giving rise to bots, or virtual assistants that respond to open-ended text messages. Bots have been evolving since the 1960s when they were dumb responders but now, thanks to better artificial intelligence and machine learning, bots are springing up to handle our shopping, payments, news reading, travel planning, customer service queries and appointment scheduling. Forbes even has a newsbot that spits out the latest stories on Telegram. This episode of The Premise explores tech’s new bot economy and bot culture, including interviews with Dennis Mortensen, cofounder and CEO of x.ai, a meeting-scheduler bot, and Peter Fjallstrom, a Swedish programmer who created a household bot for his family using Slack. Hosted by Bruce Upbin and Parmy Olson.

Listen here.

[botwatch]

The New York Times Election Bot

Add NYT Election Bot to your Slack channel to receive live results and updates on the 2016 elections from The New York Times. You can also submit questions to the newsroom by using the command /asknytelection.

[methodfuturenews-blog]

LAT Quakebot

[methodfuturenews-blog]

Automated narrative-driven insights

Quill:

http://www.narrativescience.com/quill

Wordsmith:

http://automatedinsights.com/wordsmith/

[methodfuturenews-blog]

The latest from WikipediaLiveMonitor (@WikiLiveMon). Monitoring Wikipedia to detect #BreakingNews candidates. Follow @mediagalleries for related media galleries. Both built by @tomayac in the context of #TomsPhD. Hamburg, Germany

http://wikipedia-irc.herokuapp.com/

https://twitter.com/mediagalleries/media

Finding stories by scanning Twitter is nothing new; journalists do it all the time, like a modern-day wire service. But spotting them through algorithms and reporting them via bots, with no human middle man anywhere in the process, is a different ballgame.

It's sensible enough: When people around the globe are connected and online, there's little reason not to know everything that happens the instant it does, and Steiner's work is just the latest small attempt at harnessing that huge reporting power. "The Olympics being an event of common interest, an even bigger majority of people share the event in a multitude of languages on global social network sites, which makes the event an ideal subject of study," he wrote in the paper.

http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/wikimedia-and-twitter-bots-are-breaking-the-news