Disclaimer: A robot did not write this. Neither did an
algorithm. As has been done for centuries, a human curated the
information and produced this content. But that doesn’t mean
that technology didn’t help. While it’s become easier for
journalists to find information, discover sources through the
web, and use tools like Storify to curate content, the process
still relies on bodies to scour for this information. And that’s
the challenge. In the newspaper industry, there were more than
13,000 newsroom jobs lost between 2006 and 2010, according to
Pew’s State of the News Media report. At the same time, the
amount of information available has grown at an astronomical
rate. These two things are at odds. The general fear in the
industry is that with fewer bodies to do the reporting,
journalism will suffer. That’s because the news-gathering model
is still being thought about in the old way, which assumes that
the more reporters you have the better reporting you’re able to
do. It helps, but that’s not always true. I