The hate bubbles up inside me when I read this. I read an article by the late Robert Parry, describing the meticulous work he did combing through records in presidential libraries to uncover important stories. Then to read the assertion that a machine will do "journalism" is maddening.

Meticulous work is what machines trend to be best at. The hard part for the machine would be figuring out what is importance it interest to readers.

No, repetitive work is what machines are best at. Meticulous implies attention to detail and nuance, exactly where machines fall down.

Yeah, exactly.

I know people in the journalism industry. Many people on this site see to believe they can be replaced by bots.

Good luck with that, and if it ever gets implemented, good luck with your communities and political systems ...

I think that’s partly because of the invisible skills which go into journalism. It’s easy to synthesise the text of a story from pure factual detail (the example I saw was a program writing baseball news), but I have literally no idea how journalists work out which sources are reliable or which stories are important (imagine an editor who got the Watergate story but it was in the middle of a bundle of stories covering every sport event of the same week across the entire USA).

Totally agree. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Estate

That was a nice wiki rabbit hole!