Are computers the cheap, new journalists?

Northwestern professors devise a program that can write original news articles in under a minute, for about $10 a pop

The bustling Al Jazeera newsroom: If a new computer program that creates news stories is any indication, journalism of the future may involve fewer human reporters and more software.
(Image credit: Shawn Baldwin/Corbis)

With newspapers shedding jobs and losing subscribers, it's a hard time to be a professional journalist. Narrative Science, a company affiliated with Northwestern University, just made it even harder, with new software that can write news articles in under a minute, using facts, statistics, earnings reports, and other data fed to the computer. The articles sound like they were written by humans, impressing robotics and language experts. Is this technology really so good that human writers are a big step closer to being obsolete? Here, a brief guide:

How does the software work?

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