Mathew Ingram, writing for Fortune:
It’s gone from one or two examples to a bona fide trend—which, as any journalist knows, occurs whenever there is least three of something. The trend in this case is the hiring of human editors to filter through the news, music, and other forms of content that are being produced and/or hosted by a variety of platforms. So Apple is hiring editors for its News app, which it announced at its recent developer conference, as well as editor/DJs for the streaming music service the company is rolling out soon.
And:
Facebook is launching a new feature called Instant Articles with partners like the New York Times, but the site’s staff won’t have anything to do with the selection of stories that become part of the program—and the choice of who sees them and when will be left to Facebook’s all-powerful algorithm. Much like Facebook, Google’s services are also powered completely by algorithms.
Interesting choices. Can an AI make better news/music curating choices than a human? No doubt, that day is coming. At the same time, more and more music and news is being created algorithmically. Humans are still the exclusive consumers of both news and music and we decide what is good enough to satisfy our needs.
What I dread is the day that AIs are mostly producing content for other AIs.
Maybe the can pick up some of the team from Circa since that app just folded. I hope so. I prefer curated over scraped any day.
I know a bunch of editors. I’m very much in favor of seeing them all gainfully employed by services that demonstrably suffer without them.
The problem with algorithms is they don’t have judgment and taste. They will inevitably go with the most hits possible for advertising revenue. At least with humans in charge, an article that algorithms would not consider important or hit-worthy, has a chance of being pushed to the front.
I also know a lot of unemployed journalists. (What is the plural of barista? Journalism graduates!)