DAN

But speaking with Hammond, I realized how much of the writing process—what I tend to think of as unpredictable, even baffling—can be quantified and modeled. When I write a short story, I'm doing exactly what the authoring platform does—using a wealth of data (my life experiences) to make inferences about the world, providing those inferences with an angle (or theme), the creating a suitable structure (based on possible outcomes I've internalized from reading and observing and taking creative writing classes). It's possible to give a machine a literary cadence, too: choose strong verbs, specific nouns, stay away from adverbs, and so on. I'm sure some expert grammarian could map out all the many different ways to make a sentence pleasing (certainly, the classical orators did, with their chiasmus and epanalepsis, anaphora and antistrophe).

As we've already learned with many other attempts to de-humanize the process of journalism and news gathering, it's impossible to take the human touch out completely. But advances like the ones being made by Narrative Science will reduce the number of people needed to do these jobs.

This shouldn't come as a big surprise, though. Technology has been doing this in every field and trade over the last 100 years or more. And it will only continue.

Click above for the full insightful story in The Atlantic.

Just for the record, guys, a skilled writer or editor knows it is not good enough to give the reader what the reader wants. We know we must use our intelligence and experience to give the reader what she needs to know, and to package it in a compelling way. "Reader knows best" is a pathetic ideology, a waste of our talents, and, most important, a surrender of our responsibilities. It's, you know, cheezy.

In the Cheezburger vs. Gene Weingarten "what's journalism" debate, Mr. Weingarten offered the above epistle that resonated significantly with me. At a time when our industry is acting like a chameleon, changing colors at a whim to match with the SEO gods say the people want, it's a critical message. We have a job, as editors, and just giving people what they want isn't doing that job.

Weingarten followed up his comment with this bit: "Steve Jobs, actually, understood this perfectly. His credo was not to give the user what the user says he wants. It's to show the user what he should want. That's our job."

I agree. The challenge, of course, is to figure out a way to do our job and capture new audiences while holding onto the ones we have. But we ought to do that job -- accept that challenge -- rather than just blow with the winds of analytics and SEO.

First and foremost, the concept of an “editor” at TechCrunch is essentially just a title and nothing more. Generally speaking, neither Mike nor Erick (TC’s two “co-editors”) are overlords that dictate what everyone else covers. With a few exceptions (mainly for newer writers), no one person even reads posts by any other author before they are posted.

Traditional journalists may be appalled to learn this. But this is a big key of why TechCrunch kicks their ass in tech coverage. We’re fast and furious in ways they can’t be, because they’re adhering to the old rules. Are there benefits to those old rules? Sure. But in my opinion, the benefits of the way we work far outweighs the benefits of the way they work.

If you want a more objective take, simply look at the number of tech stories we’ve broken over the years versus the number any old school publication has. Our system works.

I put "future" in quotes because, as MG Siegler lays out in his post above, it's the status quo already.

When I was on the Dow Jones Newswires desk in the late '90s, we were always struggling between the need for speed and the need for quality. But that was before the ubiquitous Internet, where the same balance is attempted to be cast on a much smaller budget and with far fewer editors. Not to mention, we really only had a handful of competitors. Not everybody could get a $10/month Web host and go up against us then.

I'm not sure how I feel about this speed, and the fact that one person exclusively sees a piece of copy before it reaches the masses (and that one person is the same who created the copy). At the same time, I'm not sure there's much that can be done to prevent this shift from precision to speed.

“If you do something that’s really awesome for the users, that’s usually something that’s not good for the publishers,” said Instapaper creator Marco Arment. “There’s always going to be pressure, from the user base and from competitors, to evade more ads.”

In this great piece by Lois Beckett at niemanlab.org, there's an honest appraisal of the digital news model challenges. Developers are building platforms for users/readers, and publishers are doing all they can to preserve the economics for advertisers.

If the piece makes any point clear, it's that collaboration between developers and publishers is what will find the future business model for news. And some responsible developers, such as Marco Arment of Instapaper, are doing just that.

Which is why it’s time for journalists to come back to Earth. We need to remember our anchors: why we are in this business, who we are, what our mission is. We’re preoccupied with conveyances instead of with good journalism. Does a story “go viral” because of the transmitting technology? No, it goes viral because it’s an insightful, groundbreaking story. The great thing about the new technologies is that a good story will always find its audience.

The new ombudsman at The Washington Post, Patrick Pexton, articulates well the value of journalism and journalists.