This spring has seen a mix of successes and failures for programmers hoping to automise elements of journalism.
In mid-March the LA Times broke the news of an earthquake in the city within minutes of it taking place with a story written by a robot, but published by a human.
However, the Guardian’s experiment was not as successful as its own robot generated story came up with something barely intelligible.
My column reflected that this was good news for journalists on the whole, although I concede there may be times when robot journalism might help us rather than undermine us. You can read the story here: http://issuu.com/nujupload/docs/thejournalist_mayjune2014/22
Other useful links:
When Robot journalism goes wrong, example 1: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/tyson-gay-becomes-tyson-homosexual-1229134
When Robot journalism goes wrong, example 2: http://www.theguardian.com/info/developer-blog/2014/mar/17/articles-dont-write-themselves-or-do-they
Rosie Niven 