By Joel Thurtell
Back in the day when I was paid for writing, we used to joke about our jobs being threatened by offshore journalists.
I had this perverse fantasy: What if the newspaper canned me and assigned my coverage of local governments to reporters in Bangalore?
Equipped with city directories and long-distance phone lines, those “foreign” correspondents could take over our jobs because, like it or not, much of what we did was “phoner” journalism anyway.What difference if we were 10 miles of 10,000 miles away?
Well, the joke is on me, because I imagined the wrong kind of replacement worker.
The work won’t be done abroad, after all.
The job will stay in the good ol’ U S of A.
It’s just that the work will be done — NO! — IS being done! — not by human writers, but by computers.
Invasion of the robo-writers!
A North Carolina company has designed software that takes basic sports facts and turns them into acceptable news copy.
Won’t be long before machines are churning out coverage of local governments. I imagine a kind of digital meat-grinder into which you could dump an assortment of facts, newspaper cliches and with a few turns of the crank, voila: a decent-reading news story, without the trouble of paying a reporter.
No health insurance, no unions, none of the smart-ass back-talk of reporters. Just a quietly running computer program.
Here at JOTR, I could dispense with the likes of Melanie Munch, Pete Pizzicato, Harold Halftime, Walker Punt, Floyd Inkjet and Ned Yardline.
They’d never be missed.
Ethical question: Would it be disingenuous of me to assign bylines to my team of robot hacks?
