Earthquakes. For anyone in the United States outside of California, they tend to be thought of in passing. Just a rare thing that makes for a lot of terrible disaster movies. Or really funny disaster movies if you're like me, and enjoy watching cinematic train wrecks only to make fun of them (looking at you, Sharknado). In the simplest of terms, earthquakes can occur when two tectonic plates collide, slip or shift. Think of it like crashing into someone holding a paper plate with one of your own. Anything could happen, and you're guaranteed it'll end up a mess. It's a simple analogy with a lot of things that don't quite match up, but it gets the point across. Today, the LA Times reported on a 4.0 earthquake in a place called Wildomar, CA.
Or, rather, a robot reported for the LA Times.
For those of you who didn't immediately click away to Google where Wildomar, CA is, it's important to note that the story posted by the LA Times was written not by a reporter, but by a program. That's right. A piece that once would have been written by a junior journalist for experience and a byline was instead produced by a computer program. At the very bottom of the article, there's a notification: "This story was automatically generated by Quakebot, a computer application that monitors the latest earthquakes detected by the USGS. A Times editor reviewed the post before it was published." That means the only human being to have anything to do with the article is the person who is the final word in what gets published or not.
Unfortunately, this is a growing trend in journalism. Bots and programs replacing actual journalists for small, basic stories. What it means is that the valuable experience junior journalists get from things like this (learning how to research, what resources should be leveraged for a particular article, or even learning how to identify a story) are now harder and harder to get. Instead, people are turning to social media (Facebook, Twitter and blogs) to get their writing experience. As someone who uses a blog as a communications platform, I can tell you that being a blogger is not going to help much on a resume. Every professional institution expects a level of social media presence from anyone it looks to hire, and not all blogs are equal.
Why should a media company hire a low-level employee with little to no experience when they can just click an algorithm and have an article automatically generated in minutes? No wages to pay out, no taxes to file, no benefits to negotiate, no vacations to schedule around...and perhaps most importantly, no unions to argue with. Major media companies consider it a win-win, while true journalism becomes a dying art. There is no longer such a thing as entry-level journalism. It doesn't exist, replaced by emotionless robot programs who are "unbiased" because they can't be. But they're also emotionless, soulless space-fillers. They report the news, but they don't bring any kind of feeling to it. And while it's nice to see an article free of any kind of toxic politicization, at the same time I wonder just how long it will be before more jobs are automated, people are replaced with machines, and there is literally nothing left for us to do. If a field as human as journalism can be automated, anything can.
The proof is in the byline.