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In an era when computers can fly planes, drive cars, and heat homes, why can't they write the news? That was an oversight that Joe Procopio, Chief Product Officer at Automated Insights, wanted addressed. He met CEO Robbie Allen, both of whom shared a belief that no one had taken a serious stab at that type of technology. Then a writer, Procopio and the rest of the team at Automated Insights saw a chance to reimagine the way natural language generation (commonly referred to as NLG) was used. NLG is, as Procopio describes it, "the process of generating narrative from, in our case, structured data." As is often the case, Automated Insights tested this new structured data with sports journalism.
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Nieman Lab
By David Chavern, News Media Alliance President & CEO — My prediction for 2017 is that the explosion of overtly "fake news" of the Macedonian teenager variety — like that found on highly influential social media platforms such as Facebook and Google during the election this year — will become a thing of the past. In fact, by this time next year, I predict we'll be joking about "Pope Endorses Trump" and other ditties from this year's election on future VH1 nostalgia shows. The reason is pretty simple: Identifying the obvious garbage isn't that hard.
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By Matt Lindsay, President, Mather Economics — We are living in the Internet age; it has caused tectonic shifts in global commerce and the economics of many industries at a scale not seen since the industrial revolution. Newspapers were in the vanguard of businesses disrupted by the new digital distribution platforms and have a lot to teach other industries that are only now beginning to feel the full disruptive power of the Internet and mobile devices. Because of their experience on the print side, newspapers are more sophisticated than most other businesses in developing new digital revenue streams, and they could emerge as leaders in the digital economy.
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Last week, bipartisan members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee introduced legislation to repeal the 41-year-old rule preventing cross ownership of newspapers and broadcast stations in the same market. In response, David Chavern, President and CEO of the News Media Alliance, stated, "We are pleased to see solid bipartisan support for commonsense legislation that reverses an outdated rule that does more harm than good. This Nixon-Administration rule has absurdly prevented investment in newspapers that have print, while digital-only properties have been free to invest (and be invested in) without restrictions."
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When we first wrote about College Town, the Raleigh News & Observer student-run online section, it was just launching. Now after six months, we checked in with editor Pressley Baird to see how the site is doing. The website covers four universities within the North Carolina Research Triangle: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, North Carolina State University and North Carolina Central University. Baird says they are regularly publishing a story every weekday on a consistent schedule. She manages 15 student writers, surpassing her expectations.
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Next year's News Media Alliance annual mediaXchange event will take place in the Birthplace of Jazz, New Orleans, from April 30-May 3, 2017. As you make plans to attend mediaXchange, don't forget to have some fun while visiting this amazing culture and food capital! We've rounded up the nine must-see events, and it's no surprise Jazz Fest is at the top of the list. This music festival has been going on since 1970 and next year runs from April 28-May 7, 2017. More than 425,000 fans attended last year. Plan to extend your stay to get in on all the fun, and read on for eight more amazing things to do in the Big Easy. Only News Media Alliance members may attend mediaXchange. If you are not a member and are interested in membership, please contact Member Services at membership@newsmediaalliance.org.
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The New York Times
It did not take long after election night for the donations to start pouring in to America's nonprofit journalism organizations.
Almost a month later, the money keeps coming, $10 and $20 and sometimes hundreds of dollars or more from small donors all over the country.
At the Center for Public Integrity in Washington and its international investigative arm, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, individual donations are up about 70 percent compared to the same period last year.
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Poynter
Here's a novel management strategy for beleaguered metro newspaper organizations — don't cut, reinvest instead.
Privately held Hearst has pursued such a program without fanfare at its five large newspapers for most of this decade — notably at its biggest property, the Houston Chronicle.
When Mark Aldam became president of Hearst Newspapers in 2011, he began by assessing the group as businesses and also for the quality of their journalism.
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Digiday
When Washington Post writer Geoff Edgers wrote an article about tracking down a lost violin in March this year, he took to Medium, home to long-form essays and think pieces, to explain the reporting process behind the final feature.
While the Post article was the finished product, the Medium article outlined Edgers' first tip-off, the 75 interviews he conducted and how he uncovered a concert listing from 1980.
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Media Life Magazine
It's happening again. And media people are really starting to get miffed.
For the third time in three months, Facebook admitted to miscalculating its metrics, disclosing the problem in a blog post.
This time, the glitch was nowhere near as problematic as the last two were for advertisers. The issue relates to miscounting of emojis and likes of live videos, as well as discrepancies in the numbers reported for web links.
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Poynter
Al Jolson, long ago America's most famous and best-paid entertainer, opened "The Jazz Singer," the first featured-length film with synchronized sound, by declaring his signature line, "You ain't seen nothing yet."
Eighty-nine years later, Shane Smith, a Canadian with ambitions to also be king of a hill, says very much the same.
The founder of Vice Media told a Hearst Magazine audience that he expects a "bloodbath" in the next year in the mobile, terrestrial and digital realms.
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Columbia Journalism Review
Innovation comes in many forms. Popular imagination often bends toward the idea of isolated genius: Thomas Edison toiling away at Menlo Park, discovering 10,000 ways not to make a lightbulb; Steve Jobs sketching the smooth contours of the iPod. For many of today's media leaders, innovation means looking beyond the horizons of their internal headquarters.
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Digiday
The prominence of fake and misleading news has shed light on how programmatic advertising and Facebook increasingly power the web, determining what readers see. Since then, Google and Facebook have vowed to stop serving ads to those shady corners of the internet.
But that doesn't stop bogus stories from making their way onto top-tier publishers, which have in some cases ended up being the unintended distributors of such stories.
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The New York Times
The proposed merger of AT&T and Time Warner has drawn censure from both sides of the political aisle, as well as a Senate hearing that looked into the potential for the combined company to become a monopoly.
But if we are going to examine media monopolies, we should look first at Silicon Valley, not the fading phone business.
Mark Cuban, the internet entrepreneur, said at the meeting of the Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee that the truly dominant companies in media distribution these days are Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon.
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Business Insider
Facebook wants to develop closer ties with the media industry.
A recently posted "Head of News Partnerships" job listing seeks someone with more than 20 years of experience in news to be the "public-facing voice of Facebook and its role in the news ecosystem."
Facebook hiring a liaison between itself and publishers could help the company distinguish between high-quality content from established media outlets and the glut of low-quality, fake news stories that go viral across its social network.
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