Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
Why journalism schools won’t quit Fox News
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
March 17, 2014, 2:23 p.m.
Reporting & Production
LINK: www.latimes.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Caroline O'Donovan   |   March 17, 2014

The East Coast woke up this morning to news that an earthquake had hit Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, folks woke up to…an actual earthquake. But who broke that story?

Indeed, Ken Schwencke, programmer and journalist at the Los Angeles Times, has been using a bot for more than a year to auto-report and publish newswire-type stories about earthquakes in California.

Schwenke continues to pursue the possibilities for robot reporting at the Times, even considering the possibility of having one bot talk to another.

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
Why journalism schools won’t quit Fox News
“In interviews for this story, the harshest position against Fox News among journalism deans seemed to be a sort of double-secret probation.”
The El País reading club creates community among Spanish-language readers
The first book was a risky pick: Poetry.
A forthcoming news site absorbs Grid (and its Middle Eastern funding, too)
The Messenger, which aims to “rekindle your passion for media” and generate $100 million in revenue in its first year, is acquiring Grid.