Are bots entitled to free speech?

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WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT BOTS. How will the courts address free-expression rights for artificially intelligent communicators? This conversation is coming, and it may push the Supreme Court to do something it has avoided: define who is and is not a journalist.

For nearly half a century, the US legal system has lived a double life. On the one hand, the Supreme Court has held that journalists do not have greater or lesser rights than other citizens (see Branzburg v. Hayes). On the other, the lower courts have generally ignored or let stand numerous laws or privileges that provide journalists special protections. These include the qualified First Amendment–based reporter’s privilege in some federal jurisdictions and fee waivers in FOI statutes.

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The Associated Press wrote 10X more articles using robots

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If you thought that journalist was not on the list of professions replaceable by robots, think again.  The Associated Press, America’s oldest 24-hour news agency, produced roughly 3,000 articles on company earnings last quarter, 10 times more than it used to, by using automated technology. Continue reading… “The Associated Press wrote 10X more articles using robots”

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Why journalism students need a basic grasp of coding

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Journalism students at most universities are required to take English composition, and other courses related to writing, yet in the debate about teaching code in journalism programs, code is often reduced to a shiny toy.

NOTE:  Anyone interested in learning to code, DaVinci Coders offers multiple courses designed to get you into the rapidly growing technology industry.  For more info please visit davincicoders.com.

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Social media changes the way the news covers conflicts around the world

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Web Summit conference in Dublin.

Social media has changed the way news organizations cover conflicts around the world, but traditional journalistic values are still vital. These were the conclusions from a panel at the Web Summit conference in Dublin. The conference featured representatives from Time, Vice News and News Corporation-owned social curation service Storyful.

 

 

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Journalism’s competition doesn’t even look like journalism

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Journalism is being replaced

Newspapers and other media entities have had to continually expand their view of who their competition is ever since the web was invented. In the old days the competition was other newspapers, and then TV, and then after the web it became other news websites, or maybe Yahoo or Google.

 

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Can Jeff Bezos reinvent the newspaper industry?

Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO,  purchased the Washington Post for $250 million.

Jeff Bezos , Amazon’s CEO, may be able to transfer his Midas touch from Amazon to usher in a “Golden Era” for the newspaper industry. He has announced that he plans to provide guidance “from a distance” – the secret to this experiment will ultimately come down to Bezos’ infamous personality.

 

 

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Reinventing the News – What Will that Look Like?

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There has been a lot of talk in media circles about how the “story” needs to be disrupted, so that news can be rendered in a way that makes more sense for a real-time, digital and mobile age — but so far all we have is more listicles and slideshows, or streams of headlines that mimic a wire service. About the only company that is really trying hard to disrupt the idea of a news story from the inside out is Circa, the news startup co-founded (and funded) by Cheezburger founder Ben Huh, and it is doing so by thinking about news the way programmers think about code, or scientists think about atoms. (Video)

 

 

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Are algorithms better storytellers than human journalists?

Articles don’t read like robots wrote them.

Narrative Science has developed an algorithm that produces a computer-written news story about every 30 seconds, Wired reports. The articles run on the websites of respected publishers like Forbes, as well as other Internet media powers (many of which are keeping their identities private).

 

 

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Longform meltdown at major newspapers in the U.S.

The number of stories longer than 2,000 words published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, from 2003 to 2012.

Major U.S. newspapers have seen a sharp decline in the last ten years in the stories that are published that contain over 2,000 words.  The Los Angeles Times has seen an 86% drop, The Washington Post down 50% and The Wall Street Journal down 35%.

 

 

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How can post-industrial journalism adapt to the new realities of news?

A manifesto on the future of news published by Columbia University’s center for digital journalism argues that the news industry as we know it no longer exists.

Over the past few years there has been a lot written about the future of the news industry.  They have written about how the rise of the web and social media have disrupted it, and how traditional players and others can recover from this disruption and repair their business models by using things like paywalls.  But the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University says that trying to figure out how to repair or rebuild the news industry is a waste of time: the paper’s authors argue that there is no such thing as the “news industry” any more, in any realistic sense, and the sooner both new and existing players get used to that idea the better off everyone will be.

 

 

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State of the American News Media 2011: Report

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Why do networks still do news?

By several measures, the state of the American news media improved in 2010.

After two dreadful years, most sectors of the industry saw revenue begin to recover. With some notable exceptions, cutbacks in newsrooms eased. And while still more talk than action, some experiments with new revenue models began to show signs of blossoming.

 

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Online News Now More Popular Than Print In US

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A new survey reveals that more people read their news online in America than in a printed newspaper, although local and national TV is still the primary source of news for most.

Online news is now the third most-popular form of news according to new reports from the Pew Research Center for people and the press.

“News awareness is becoming an anytime, anywhere, any device activity for those who want to stay informed,” said the new report.

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