My boss is a robot - science journalism "automated"

[Ronja]

This is beyond cool

crowdsourced journalism

Welcome to My Boss is a Robot.

We created this blog to chronicle our attempt to answer a question: can unskilled, crowdsourced labor be used to create a product that require skills, experience and insight?

We’re both journalists, so we’ve chosen a product we’re familiar with: the news story. We want to create a high-quality piece that could run in a reputable news magazine or newspaper. And we’re going to assign this job to the workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an outsourcing website. We want the workers on MTurk to do the reporting, writing, editing and fact-checking — all the parts of the editorial process. ...

source: http://mybossisarobot.com/?p=21

"Ordinary" journalistic pieces produced with the same method were judged by a "jury" of 15 people, and found better and more even quality than news articles wrtitten by individual journalists.

... To test CrowdForge's ability to write articles, CMU tasked it with preparing five articles on New York City. Each article would require 36 sub-tasks - 36 authors adding a sliver of information for roughly 10c a pop. It would cost an average of $3.26 to prepare a 650-odd word piece.

CMU crowdsourced its work through Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online marketplace for work. Employers can post simple, self-contained tasks that "turkers" complete in return for a few cents. Eight writers were then paid $3.05 to write articles on the same five subjects. The average length came out at 393 words.

Here's the bad news for journalists - when 15 people compared the articles, they rated the crowdsourced articles of higher quality than those produced by individuals. In a further blow to the writers, the crowdsourced articles were rated about the same quality as a Wikipedia entry on the topic. The variability - the range from the best to the worst article - was also lower for the crowdsourced articles.

"This is exciting because collaborative crowdsourcing could change the future of work," assistant professor in CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Aniket Kittur, said. "We foresee a day when it will be possible to tap into hundreds of thousands or millions of workers around the globe to accomplish creative work on an unprecedented scale."

In fact, it worked so well, a couple of San Francisco-based science journalists - Jim Giles and MacGregor Campbell - have created a blog, http://www.mybossisarobot.com, to explore using CrowdForge for preparing science news articles based on research reports.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/technology/news- ... z1DOpVzbIq