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Four years ago, The Washington Post covered two major news events the old-fashioned way.
For the Olympics in London, sports reporters tallied up the medal counts on television and hand-wrote briefs for the website. And when the election came around a few months later, four Post scribes took a look at election returns and hand-wrote lots of little results stories — who won what, and where.
This year, that work is being done by robots. Kind of.
Earlier today, The Washington Post announced it's joining the growing number of news organizations who are using language-generation technology to produce stories automatically.
Heliograf, a tool developed by The Washington Post's engineering team, will use data and language templates to generate automatic briefs on medal tallies, event schedules and competition results for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. Those briefs will be fed into The Washington Post's main Olympics liveblog, which will also be home to stories written by the newspaper's sports reporters....
And the winner for media coverage at the Olympics is… Robots? The Washington Post is supplementing Olympics and election coverage with robot reports.