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Lessons learned in The Building of Lost Causes
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March 17, 2014, 2:23 p.m.
Reporting & Production
LINK: www.latimes.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Caroline O'Donovan   |   March 17, 2014

The East Coast woke up this morning to news that an earthquake had hit Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, folks woke up to…an actual earthquake. But who broke that story?

Indeed, Ken Schwencke, programmer and journalist at the Los Angeles Times, has been using a bot for more than a year to auto-report and publish newswire-type stories about earthquakes in California.

Schwenke continues to pursue the possibilities for robot reporting at the Times, even considering the possibility of having one bot talk to another.

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Lessons learned in The Building of Lost Causes
“The skills we developed while facing down the fossil fuel industry — persistence through trolling campaigns, converting readers one by one, turning an upstart publication into essential reading — these aren’t just about journalism. They’re about how to keep building when everything around you feels like it’s crumbling.”
Publishers find the AI era not all that lucrative
“Welcome, surely. Lucrative, in a sense. Game changer? Hardly.”
Embrace the barbell
“It’s time to abandon middling stories and go very short or very long.”