In 2009, a team of researchers and students at Northwestern University developed software that fully automates the writing of baseball game recaps. StatsMonkey relies on publicly available data, like box scores, and a series of pre-written partial story templates. It can analyze a team’s changing probability of winning, play by play, find important moments from…
Phil Hands is either “a moron” or “brilliant,” depending on what he draws. The nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist at the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison regularly pokes fun of President Donald Trump. The progressive readership in equally progressive Madison eats it up. But Hands often hears from Trump supporters elsewhere in the country who don’t…
A reflection And then there were none. The executives at Lee Enterprises, which bought the Post-Dispatch in 2005, have been sloughing off accomplished journalists, writers and copy editors, helter-skelter, like a pine tree shedding cones in a hurricane. And they’re still at it. Lee announced, on Feb. 16, that the few, the proud, the survivors…
Jim DeRogatis, a Chicago pop music critic with a hard news background, almost threw away a fax he received the day before Thanksgiving in 2000. It was that fax–and not an anonymous videotape–that started DeRogatis on the trail of singer-songwriter R. Kelly, who was charged and arrested on Friday for sex crimes. The inaccurate videotape…
With fewer high school journalism programs in Southern Illinois and even fewer schools printing a student newspaper, 4-H in Perry County is stepping in with the launch of the monthly Clover Leaf. The new student newspaper is a unique collaboration between a community publisher and 4-H that gives elementary, middle and high school students a…