The Los Angeles Times was first to publish a breaking news story concerning an earthquake in LA on Monday thanks to a robot called Quakebot. The writing robot was designed by journalist and programmer Ken Schwencke who created an algorithm which produces short news stories triggered by the occurrence of an earthquake.
Quakebot is designed to extract data from the US Geological Survey when an earthquake above a certain size arises. The data is then inserted into a ready written template and goes into the newspaper's document management system for proofing and publication by a human editor.
The earthquake took place at 6.25am on Monday and Schwencke had the news published "within three minutes," according to a quote on Slate.
The speedy report, as written by Quakebot, is reproduced below:
"A shallow magnitude 4.7 earthquake was reported Monday morning five miles from Westwood, California, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The temblor occurred at 6:25 a.m. Pacific time at a depth of 5.0 miles.
According to the USGS, the epicenter was six miles from Beverly Hills, California, seven miles from Universal City, California, seven miles from Santa Monica, California and 348 miles from Sacramento, California. In the past ten days, there have been no earthquakes magnitude 3.0 and greater centered nearby.
This information comes from the USGS Earthquake Notification Service and this post was created by an algorithm written by the author.
Read more about Southern California earthquakes."
This report may seem basic, but it has since been updated 71 times by a human editor as its initial purpose is to quickly and accurately announce the breaking news.
"It saves people a lot of time, and for certain types of stories, it gets the information out there in usually about as good a way as anybody else would. The way I see it is, it doesn’t eliminate anybody’s job as much as it makes everybody’s job more interesting," Schwencke reasoned.
Murderbot?
Quakebot is not the only writing 'robot' used by the LA Times. Other computer algorithms are implemented to aid article drafting, including one which generates articles for the paper regarding homicides in the city. These articles are then queued and human editors hold the responsibility to decide which stories need more attention, further investigation and publication.
