January, 2016
 
 
 
 
 
 
     
 
 
By Mahrukh Farooq

At the 4th National Media Conference held in November 2015, Muhammad Ziauddin, a senior journalist, stressed on the dichotomy or ‘disconnect’ that exists between media owners, editors, bureau chiefs and working journalists and how both the quality of reporting as well as the state of overall journalism is being adversely affected.

Other senior journalists present spoke of the immense commercialization that had apparently taken over the profession, causing standards to drastically fall in the past few years. Arif Nizami, the editor of Pakistan Today, highlighted the lack of interest and knowledge on part of the proprietors which has created a gap between managements and journalists.

Sentiments such as these expressed at the conference are widespread when it comes to how journalism is conducted in Pakistan. With the exception of a few, most journalists emphasize on creating content that is sensational and more likely to draw readership/viewership and ratings. To add to this sorry state of affairs is the kind of content being written or presented, a substantial amount of which leaves much to be desired in terms of quality.

Such deplorable conditions of Pakistani journalism can somewhat be attributed to ineffective management, time constraints and an immense pressure to deliver. Since many journalists’ jobs literally depend on the amount of news material they are able to churn out, a lot of them end up overlooking several significant details, resulting in extremely low quality news writing or production.

In spite of such shortcomings, journalism in Pakistan is at a stage where a great level of emphasis is laid on the power of the word and the need for the human element in every story, something which no longer holds true for other parts of the world. Just last year, America’s leading multinational non-profit news agency, Associated Press announced that it would be partnering with the North Carolina tech company, Automated Insights, to outsource its articles on quarterly earnings reports to a report writer, namely ‘Wordsmith’. A natural language generation platform, Wordsmith will write 4,400 articles, all formatted for AP style, in mere seconds, as compared to 300 articles developed every quarter by humans.

“We’re producing articles that never would have existed in the first place,” said James Kotecki, manager of Media and Public Relations at Automated Insights. Lou Ferrara, the Managing Editor of Associated Press, echoed these sentiments by presenting the development as a win-win situation and saying that the technology will, in fact, free journalists to do more journalism, while leaving the tedious task of data collection and interpretation to computers.

This event was one amongst many such agreements taking place between notable companies. Just six weeks after the announcement made by Associated Press, Google declared its purchase of Jetpac, an app which uses image-recognition software to automatically generate city guides. Specifically, the app examines publicly shared Instagram photos and produces customized geographic information as well as recommendations of destinations based on key indicators of human experience and culture.

 

 
The Los Angeles Times, in fact, already has a program in place whenever it needs an article drafted on earthquakes taking place in the region. Quakebot is an algorithm developed by Ken Schwencke, who is a journalist and a programmer for the newspaper. It is designed to extract relevant data from the U.S Geological Survey (USGS) report about any earthquake that may have occurred and place it into a pre-written template, all within seconds. The story goes into the LA Times’ content management system where it awaits review and publishing orders from a human editor. “The goal is to get the basic information out as quickly and accurately as possible,” says Schwencke. “That way, everybody else can go and find out whether anybody was hurt, was anything changed and what the people at the USGS have to say.”

And it seems like publications and IT companies are not the only organizations that are turning towards such technology; the ‘What-If Machine’ or WHIM research project, a three-year European initiative funded by the FP7 programme of the European Commission, aims to build a software that is able to ‘invent, evaluate and present fictional ideas with real cultural value for artifacts such as stories, jokes, films, paintings and advertisements.’

The convenience provided to leading publications notwithstanding, the question remains: does automated journalism have a future? According to Automated Insights CEO, Robbie Allen, the answer is already in the affirmative. In his view, robot journalists have the potential to entirely customize truckloads of data that might otherwise go unanalyzed. In fact, he paints a future where everyone may have their very own personal robot journalist, filling them in on information and stories as per their preferences.

“We sort of flip the traditional content creation model on its head,” he says. “Instead of one story with a million page view, we’ll have a million stories with one page view each.”

Kotecki shares the same sentiments and expresses his belief that the technology will, in fact, help add more substance to stories. “We’re going to be able to do a lot more in the future. Our algorithms will get more sophisticated and more people will collect data sets [for the purpose of] creating stories. What’s exciting is the prospect of qualitative data being turned into what feels like quantitative data, so we can turn out stories with more nuance.”

The key element here is convenience; the opportunity to produce readable material in the minimum possible time. Yet, with the technology in its nascent stages, many companies are still looking for ways in which it can automate the addition of one-liners that can potentially make an article a good read. According to Simon Colton, a professor of computational creativity and the coordinator of the ‘What-If Machine’ project, however, the chances of that happening are very slim.
“To me these projects [such as Wordsmith] are straightforward data visualizations,” says Colton. “Instead of pie charts and graphs they do words, and they miss various aspects needed for a good read. I tell people not to worry about their creative jobs being threatened by automation because of what I call ‘the humanity gap’. Even if software was good at wit, humour and writing style, it would not be human. If you want human insight, you’re not going to get it from a computer any time soon.”

Although Pakistan at present seems nowhere near adopting this particular technology, one can still notice the almost mechanical way in which news writing is being conducted. The business of writing news articles has come to resemble that of an industrial assembly line with many news items that are churned out looking exactly the same, despite originating from different newspapers and magazines. This symbolizes a lack of the will to broaden one’s perspectives as well as conduct in-depth analysis of news events. The results are news stories that follow a standard format representing only one angle to a particular story to the extent that sometimes, the same adjectives are used to describe scenes of tragedy or joy.

Whatever the case may be, it is indeed clear that unless Pakistani journalism is injected with professionalism and the colour and vibrancy associated with fresh new perspectives towards news developments, we as an audience will continue to be treated to substandard pieces of journalistic ‘masterpieces’.
 

 
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