Can Software Trump Editors in the Newsfeed Wars?
Summary
Big tech companies have been frantically opening their wallets in recent weeks to buy out small startups making mobile-friendly applications that use software to pull together news from innumerable sources around the Web.Right now, algorithm- and artificial intelligence-based apps that comb over disparate sources of information, pull out the most important parts, and reassemble them in a smaller package can do a good job of telling a user what’s going on in the broader news world.It would spit out to the user a short, concise sentence: Kansas City Chiefs select Central Michigan offensive tackle Eric Fisher with the first pick in the draft.The ambition was certainly aimed in the right direction—when it launched publicly about a year ago, CEO Adrian Aoun told me that “it makes you wonder why something like what we’re building doesn’t live inside Google Plus.” But over several rounds of trying Wavii on my smartphone, I was never quite able to get the stuff I actually wanted to see consistently on my main feed.Breaking News general manager Cory Bergman summarized in this blog post how the staff decided to wait in one of these occasions, balancing a number of conflicting reports about whether there had been a suspect arrested early in the investigation.
Classifications
AskAI Classifications
LabelsLinked Companies
