How to Compete With a Computer in the Online News Media Game

It seems every day we turn around and a computer or a robot is taking the job of the human. Certainly, it’s helped our civilization and many industries create incredible productivity, but those jobs may never be coming back. As we complain about jobs being outsourced to other countries overseas, we also should be concerned with the jobs being replaced in our own country by robots. Okay so, let’s talk about this for second shall we?

Let’s say you are a news reporter, or you are producing news content for the Internet, or a local newspaper. How on earth can you compete with computers to generate news stories? Oh you hadn’t heard, you didn’t know that many of the articles you read online were actually created by a computer program rather than human, did you – it’s true. In fact, there are now computer programs which scan the Internet for various events, and when they see similar stories popping up in various places they create a unique title using derivative algorithmic tricks, and then go online and find the;

Who
What
When
Where
Why
How

And then they take that information and put it into a paragraph format just as any news story might read. Of course, the whole thing is plagiarized, but it’s plagiarized from so many different sources, that no one would ever know the difference. And this is what’s going on today. But how can a news reporter keep up with that? Interestingly enough, many news reporters rather than doing actual reporting do the same thing. They go onto the Internet read 4 or 5 articles on the same news event, and a rewrite it and make their own story.

This is unfortunate because no one knows if the original information from the very first article or the first few articles is even correct? Because of computers, humans trying to compete have cheated just as the computers are cheating. And because of this, we are getting lousy news stories and content online, much of it may not even be correct. Further, who is to say someone didn’t plant 4 or 5 stories in the media that they just made up, creating a news event that never happened in the first place, how would we ever know?

If you want to compete against computers when you create news articles, then you need to go to the source of the article, get personal interviews of people who were actually there, talk to them on the phone, and then use their first-hand account and their own words, quoting them in your article. Otherwise, you’re just putting more garbage on top of garbage, and as a news junkie, I’m tired of reading it. This is how you can do it right and create great news content and still compete. Please consider all this and think on it.

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