You will know that Skynet has arrived and the ultimate war against the humans is imminent when someone invents a hyperlocalization news tool like that described by Jeff Sonderman in his commentary for Poynter.org about Google News’ new “news near you” service. In summary: Google takes aim at the mobile market by using your mobile device’s geolocation info to feed you more or less hyperlocal news results; Jeff says it’s great as far as it goes, but he wants more — more headlines, more curation, more socialization. His area, metro Washington, D.C., used to have something close to what he wants — it was called TBD.com, and it was killed in its crib a few months ago. Actually, Jeff is looking for the robot version, a “killer app,” and a certain level of personalization — a step beyond hyperlocalization:
“To create a market-dominating filter of local news, someone will need to curate the pool of aggregated news to match each reader’s interests, browsing history and social network activity, in addition to his or her location.
“The killer app would be one that filters a breadth of local aggregation like Outside.in through a hyperpersonalized social filter sought by mobile services such as News.me and Trove combined with the personal browsing and search history of Google.”
And he’s right. If someone can invent a computer program that can do all that, it will be a killer, all right — it might kill the need to have humans involved in the news-delivery process (that would be the group usually called editors or producers) at all.
Newsroom With A View 
[…] Thanks to Matthew Ingram of GigaOm for transparency and the work compiling a debate conducted via Twitter about news stories offering links to source material. That news stories should provide links is a given for many, like Matthew, but it’s not a universal view. I think it’s the ideal (as Matthew writes, doing readers a service “by making stories as complete as possible and by providing them with links to further information instead of making them hunt through Google for it” — which also makes sure they don’t find misinformation via Google), but I struggle, given the limitations of the content-management systems I’m familiar with, with the idea of where in the process the links get inserted and by whom, especially if it’s to be the norm for all staff-generated stories. The Web “staff” at most news sites are not enough to handle the volume, and as noted by Patrick LaForge in the Twitter debate, it doesn’t fit neatly into the reporting and writing process. Which is probably how we arrive at the current state of affairs: Stories deemed to be important and of high reader interest get the attention needed to build the Web extras, including links to outside material, but the typical story is linkless. (Another job for the robots?) […]
[…] right, so maybe it won’t be robot editors who take our jobs. Instead it might be the readers themselves who become their own news editors, […]