This Media Startup Is Beating the Competition With a Newsroom Run by Robots
3rd September 2018
News of Kim Jong-Nam’s death was quickly picked up in Japan not by one of the country’s giant media conglomerates, but by a small startup. JX Press Corp., a news technology venture founded in 2008 by Katsuhiro Yoneshige while he was still a freshman in college, reported the incident more than half an hour faster than the big names, according to one observer. It did so even though it has no journalists, let alone any international bureaus.
“NewsDigest got the scoop at 19:52, and TV stations had it about 20:30,” sociologist Noritoshi Furuichi wrote on Twitter after reports of Kim’s death. “Television has succumbed to being a slow media.”
JX Press’s secret, it turns out, is a combination of social media and artificial intelligence. Yoneshige and his team have developed a tool, using machine learning, for finding breaking news in social media posts and writing it up as news reports. Essentially, it’s a newsroom staffed by engineers.
And, I suspect, it didn’t have the proglodyte slant so pervasive at major news outlets.