Author: Ben Lyons

Brave new world? Robot reporters take over beats

BY BEN LYONS// When an earthquake occurred at 6:25 a.m. on March 17, it may have given “robot” journalism its first big break. The early morning tremblor allowed an algorithm created by L.A. Times programmer and journalist Ken Schwencke to report the story ahead of other outlets.

The story took only about three minutes to appear online, drawing information such as the quake’s time, magnitude and epicenter from the United States Geological Survey and inserting it into a pre- fabricated template.

Transparency bots catch congressional information tampering

By BEN LYONS// Monitoring Wikipedia edits made from Rus- sian government addresses, an automated tool caught controversial changes in the wake of the Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 crash in Ukraine this July. Someone at a state-run TV and radio network, VGTRK, anonymously removed mentions of Russian Federation-sourced missiles, swapping in Ukrainian soldiers as the culprits.

The program, or bot, that discovered the edit then automatically posted to Twitter on its account @RUGovEdits. A similar bot, watching for changes from Boeing IP addresses, discovered edits to the article on Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system. The Boeing additions cast doubt on an analysis that found the system’s intercept rate to be low.

Skeletons in the closet? Uncovering embarrassing Wiki edits by Pentagon, Congress

A recent movement to track in real-time edits government organizations anonymously make to Wikipedia has also turned up deep archives of changes made dating back more than 10 years. For instance, thanks to Jari Bakken, lead developer of a Norwegian parliamentary watchdog account, a database of 1,843 edits made at Pentagon IP addresses from 2004-2010 is now publically available.…

Look before you link

By BEN LYONS / On July 19, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof wrote that “Hamas sometimes seems to have more support on certain college campuses in America or Europe than within Gaza,” in a column titled “Who’s right and wrong in the Middle East.” If you read the online version of his column, the first link (under the text “on certain college campuses…”) would send you to a Washington Post article on the American Studies Association’s backing an academic boycott of Israeli universities in December 2013.

On Twitter, a few readers asked Kristof about the link. Said Chase Madar (a lawyer and journalist, according to his bio): “The article that you link to about the ASA #BDS resolution does not even mention Hamas, by the way.”

Kristof’s reply was a stunner. He said “[I] write the column, and someone else chooses links later, so don’t read too much into the links except as further resources.” For those following the exchange, this became the bigger story.

Transparency bots hint at better uses for news algorithms

By BEN LYONS / Monitoring Wikipedia edits made from Russian government addresses, an automated tool caught controversial changes in the wake of the Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 crash in Ukraine this July. Someone at a state-run TV and radio network, VGTRK, anonymously removed mentions of Russian Federation-sourced missiles, swapping in Ukrainian soldiers as the culprits.