Posts tagged sportswriting
Baseball. Books. The Boy Wonder. Newspapers. Unabridged.
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:
