Cover the Planet

By David Poulson

About a half-dozen years ago I attended a conference on science journalism in Hanover. A foundation had assembled a bunch of university types and magazine editors to discuss a new curriculum for teaching science journalism at German universities.

Among the presenters was a German professor who laid out the case for establishing quote banks and description depots.  The idea was to warehouse thoroughly vetted quotes, descriptions and other elements of science journalism. Then journalists could select from these stockpiles the prefab parts needed to assemble entire news stories.

These parts could be reused in different configurations and to varying degrees, helping journalists create different stories from the same stockpile. The proponent argued that this was good for credibility. All of the material would be pre-approved for accuracy.

Many of us - well, at least many of the Americans - looked at each other in horror. I distinctly recall one of them leaning over and whispering, “That’s exactly how I teach my students not to write.”

I believed then, or at least chose to believe then, that this could never come to pass. But check out this story in the New York Times regarding the rise and fall of the media. It refers to the development of algorithms that assemble facts into narratives without the benefit of writers. Not only are the parts prefab, in this scenario robots replace workers on the assembly line.

Fine journalism crafted by real writers may not go away. But I am troubled by this sentence in the Times story: “The results would not be mistaken for literary journalism, but on the Web, pretty good — or even not terrible — is often good enough.”

Where does that leave journalists? Well, I guess we’ll always need parts manufacturers. But I sure hate to think that fine journalism ends up with the same fate as handcrafted automobiles - rare and expensive to produce.

I find hope at the end of the very same news story. It is here where reporter David Carr makes the case that young writers come to New York armed with ideas, energy and technology, and to bust down doors to a new brand of journalism.  That’s exciting.

But perhaps the true hope lies in Carr’s final sentence:

For them, New York is not an island sinking, but one that is rising on a fresh, ferocious wave.

I’d like to see the robot that can craft an ending like that.

Errr…actually not.