The “robotic journalist” is already a reality in the top journals of the United States that battles, in a daily basis, to be on top of the technological innovations.
The digital ecosystem, which is the field in which these modern tools are deployed, welcomes not only this masterpiece of artificial intelligence we call a ‘robot’ or ‘bot’, but also other devices such as headphones and viewfinders, which will change the ways of seeing and reading the news in the immediate future.
These last mentioned devices, but especially the viewfinders, open up the field to two platforms of technological creativity, the “virtual reality” and the “augmented reality”, in which videos with live images or animated graphics, voice and text, compete with the printed journalism or newspapers.
The new generations of readers or users of social media are fascinated by these options and hence the demand and popularity of these new devices exist, these allow people to see the world and its realities in diverse dimensions.
The “robotic journalist” has been used, since just a few years ago, in the development of news based off of data that real journalists prepare to feed the technological braincells, a way to automate the use of digital files and allow human reporters to concentrate in deeper approaches.
This technology that has burst into American newspapers awakens many concerns about whether the work of the human journalist would eventually be completely replaced by the job of these machines.
Two major news agencies, such as the Associated Press, of the United States, and Reuters, of England, have also incorporated these new technologies into their news broadcasting services.
The AP, which in its 150 years of existence has been a pioneer in innovations, using first messaging pigeons, horses, railroads, steam boats, telegraphs, radio and the transmission of photos by telephone, nowadays features 360 degree videos and “augmented reality”, to diversify their news service.
Reuters, also recently, has created a system that allows you to identify the last-minute events that are broadcasted through Twitter and other social media webpages and, once checked under an excellent monitoring and debugging system, this gives the front blow to the race of the novelties.
This technology makes it possible to gather all the reliable elements of an episode and re-arrange them, to offer them within a larger context. It also helps the reporters who cover the pending episode, all the newsworthy prequels and offer a more complete view of the whole event.
Entering the contest to be at the top of the innovations costs a lot of money. And that makes the printed media integrated with the digital think carefully to the point where it is advisable to empty one’s pockets to support the digital platform, which is where the crucial struggle for the mastery of audiences materializes.
The Dominican media aren’t yet up to the levels of these pressures, but there is no doubt that as this usage of bots keeps getting popularized and demonstrate its planetary scope, we will have to decide to adapt ourselves to it and apply this technology according to the profitability or monetization levels that we might find foreseeable.
There’s no way to get out of the way and ignore the strength and relevance of these technological trends. The future is here. And we have to live it fully.
Translated from spanish by Randy Rodríguez
Director's Thoughts 