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TREND 019 • FOURTH YEAR ON THE LIST
Bots
Chatbots are being used by news-
rooms worldwide.
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Key Insight
The term “bot” has become part of
our mainstream vocabulary. Bots at
the most basic level are software
applications designed to automate
a specified task. In the context of
journalism, bots can be divided into
two main categories: news bots and
productivity bots. News bots can help
aggregate and automatically alert a
user about a specified event, whereas
productivity bots are tools journal-
ism organizations should be using to
help automate and streamline their
day to day operations. The major risk
associated with news bots is that they
are only as reliable as the program-
ming behind it. People or groups with
nefarious interests can use bots to
disseminate erroneous information.
Examples
Many newsrooms have experimented
with chatbots, including BuzzFeed,
TexasTribune, Quartz, Mic, Los An-
geles Times and elsewhere. Imagine
you’re a media outlet and you want
to stay updated and report on earth-
quakes that happen across the world.
You can manually sign up for alerts
from the United States Geological
Survey (USGS), receive an alert, and
have someone write a blurb about the
earthquake…or you can design a bot.
Using easy to program software, an
earthquake tracking bot could take
notifications from the USGS and cre-
ate or publish a blurb about the most
recent earthquake. The automation
allows news to go out in a timelier
manner and allows individuals to use
their time on more difficult tasks.
What’s Next
Bots will continue to play an im-
portant role in journalism and other
content-rich fields. On the creator
level, seminars and courses are being
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offered at institutions such as the
University of Texas to help students
and professionals learn how to design
bots that suit specific needs. Media
organizations will continue to devel-
op and refine bots to automate news
related tasks freeing up time to allow
individuals to devote time to more
important tasks.
Japanese media startup JX Press
Corp developed a tool that leverages
social media and artificial intelligence
to scour posts across different plat-
forms and then write news reports.
Look for more companies to harness
the combination of bots and AI to
create new kinds of content. With
elections taking place around the
world, misinformation bots will con-
tinue to play a big role on Facebook,
Twitter and Instagram. We expect
to see more companies touting tech
based solutions to address the issue.
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