Posts tagged mizzou
Baseball. Books. The Boy Wonder. Newspapers. Unabridged.
147/366 A screen capture snapped off my computer of Mizzou baseball coach Tim Jamieson, someone who was patient enough to teach the game to this young punk reporter (and failed player), as he’s being doused following the Tigers’ Big 12 Championship — a marvelous way to leave for the SEC. (Taken with instagram)
140/366 A semi-annual trip to make sure the columns are still standing so the boy wonder can climb up on them. (Taken with instagram)
32/366 Spent the day digging into the Kansas-Mizzou rivalry and great games dating all the way back to 1922 or so. (Taken with instagram)
The Computer that wants to be a Sportswriter
ST. LOUIS - There was a legend when I was a young baseball writer that eventually every reporter covers enough games, sees enough results, and writes enough copy that he could keep a Rolodex of gamers. They could be indexed by outcome (Rout, seven runs or greater; Walk-off), theme (Injury, back from; Redemption, veteran) or feat (Home Runs, three hit; Shutout, one hit allowed). Simply spin the directory, thumb the appropriate gamer and fill in the new names, appropriate score, location and perhaps spruce it up with some hip new verbs. And, voila! -30-.
Far from being something to achieve, the Rolodex of gamers was a cautionary tale, something to work diligently to avoid before you became repetitive and obsolete.
Apparently the Rolodex is real. It’s coming for our jobs.
In Sunday’s New York Times, a business column by Steve Lohr explored the growing efficiency and effectiveness of “robot journalists,” or artificial intelligence programs that are writing – ahem, producing – articles. Lohr’s story focuses Narrative Science, a tech company in Evanston, Ill., home of that other top journalism school in America, Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. Narrative Science specializes in computer-generated content, and that content is getting less computer-like all the time. For his lede, Lohr quotes from an article written by the Narrative Science program. Of course, it’s a sports story.
“WISCONSIN appears to be in the driver’s seat en route to a win, as it leads 51-10 after the third quarter. Wisconsin added to its lead when Russell Wilson found Jacob Pedersen for an eight-yard touchdown to make the score 44-3 … . ”
Sportswriting is the natural place for the roboreporters to start their revolution. Games are easy to distill into numbers, right down to the integers that are the very definition of sport – the final score. What happened in a baseball game can be conveyed in a box score or strings of code that detail play by play. We are able to quantify everything these days – right down to the millimeter of break on Mariano Rivera’s cut fastball – and all that info plays right into the roboreporter’s wheelhouse. The computer doesn’t have any problem taking this data and transforming it into a paint-by-numbers game story that tells what happened.
The improving quality of articles from these AI programs prompted Businessweek.com to ask in August 2010, “Are Sportswriters Really Necessary?” The article, by Justin Bachman, used press releases from college sports information departments – again press releases, not game stories from beat writers; press releases! – to compare the flesh-and-blood copy against the J-bot’s. In the computer-generated story, the program writes (relatively speaking) about a college baseball game: “The Hawkeyes (16-21) were unable to overcome a four-run sixth inning deficit. The Hawkeyes clawed back in the eighth inning, putting up one run.”
“There’s no human author and no human editing,” Narrative Science’s CEO Stuart Frankel told Bachman more than a year ago. “But the stories sound really good.”
No, news flash, they don’t.
They sound formulaic. They sound stilted. They are, by the nature of their learning database, going to rely on cliché instead of toy with cliché. They are dull.
But, here’s the problem:
Digging through some old files, I found this copy of an editorial cartoon from my freshman year about the University of Missouri’s six signature columns. I drew it for The Maneater back in 1994. What was true then, is still true today. Probably could recycle this cartoon every four years or so.
The student journalists who defied the Kingfish
Carl Corbin, who died this past week at 96 in New Orleans, was one of the “Reveille Seven,” a group of students so-named because they refused to work at LSU’s student newspaper, The Reveille, after it had been censored by Huey Long. Corbin was the assistant editor of the paper in 1934 when the paper planned to print a letter critical of the then-U.S. Senator for appointing an LSU football player to a vacant position. The hint of criticism in a student newspaper sent Long into spasms of censorship. Three students, including Corbin, resigned rather than kowtow Long’s demands, and all three were promptly expelled. Four others were expelled for supporting the three students. All of them worked at the paper to offset tuition, and here’s where John Pope’s obituary in The Times-Picayune this week picks up:
The dispute, which raged for three weeks, “got down to be a fine point of freedom of expression,” Mr. Corbin said. “We were defending the right of a student to express himself.”
Although the seven students thought they had little hope of finishing their degrees, the University of Missouri welcomed them. Mr. Corbin graduated in January 1936 and started as a Times-Picayune reporter two months later.
In 1935, the dean of the Missouri School of Journalism, Frank L. Martin, invited the Reveille Seven to enroll in its school. All seven accepted, and a picture of their arrival on campus during a snowy March day, can be seen here. (They are, of course, gathered around the signature lions.) Corbin graduated from Mizzou’s J-School in 1936 and was hired by The Times-Picayune within a couple months. (Sounds familiar, minus the whole expelled, freedom-of-the-press thing.) Corbin was working as a reporter when Long’s deep-rooted scandals were unearthed, and LSU later wiped the Reveille Seven’s expulsions from the official record and lauded the students as “courageous.” (See the Reveille’s obit for Corbin here.)
Fifty years after they walked out of the student newspaper, the Reveille Seven returned to campus in 1984, and again in 1996 they were honored.
“While no current editors have faced anything of that magnitude during our stints at The Reveille, we work pervasively to honor the Seven’s legacy,” the current staff of the Reveille wrote in an editorial published Wednesday. “Whether it’s the ‘Jindal Tracker,’ which we used to count the number of days Gov. Bobby Jindal remained silent on questions about his stance on higher education’s role amid statewide budget cuts, or the online salary database … The Reveille’s pages are still asking all the important questions, especially when we’re questioning our leaders.
“These are just a couple examples of the Reveille Seven’s legacy being preserved more than seven decades later. In the same way the Reveille Seven challenged boundaries with their headstrong coverage, legions of Reveille employees since them have worked to serve the LSU community’s need to receive holistic information.”
That is the most fitting tribute of all.
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