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May 23, 2018, 11:26 a.m.
LINK: www.algorithmic.news  ➚   |   Posted by: Christine Schmidt   |   May 23, 2018

Even if automation is creeping into all corners of our lives, at least we humans can still get together in real life to talk about it.

At the Algorithms, Automation, and News conference in Munich this week, some of journalism’s biggest brainiacs shared their research on everything from bot behavior to showing your work when it’s automated to reporting through the Internet of Things. Many of academics’ relevant papers will be published in a forthcoming issue of Digital Journalism. (Full list of presenters, panelists, and papers here.)

Algorithmic accountability — reverse-engineering and reporting on the algorithms across our lives, from Facebook to Airbnb to targeted job listings — is a hot topic in journalism, but this conference focused more on the silver linings: how automation and algorithms could bolster newsrooms full of human journalists.

Here are some of the top tweets from the Munich mind-gathering:

The Associated Press’ director of information management Stuart Myles walked attendees through the AP’s process for making automation in news more transparent (hint: it includes automating transparency):

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Here’s how 13 news outlets are using LinkedIn newsletters
“While you’re less at the whim of the algorithm, it’s still social media.”
Forget the link tax. Focus on one key metric to “save local news”
“You need Google to stay in this. Otherwise, it devastates the entire industry.”
So who are the consistent news avoiders?
“No single variable is more predictive of whether someone consistently avoids news than their level of interest in politics and civic affairs.”