Virtual News at Seven

As progress marches forward, lots of different industries have understandably feared disintermediation. Journalists, naturally, are one such bunch. However, they have adapted nicely to the rise of citizen journalism and bloggers. Witness, for example, Gannett's move to crowdsource. But what if news could somehow be automated and delivered in a compelling way?

That's the idea behind News at Seven, a project out of Northwestern University's Intelligent Information Laboratory. It's an automatic system that puts together a custom daily news show by pulling together images, videos, and blogs into a report delivered by a virtual news team. All of this takes place without human intervention.

News at Seven is completely customizable based on the user's preferences. The characters can be altered too. For example, you can elect to have sports stories presented by a player. The project will also buid custom avatars to present the news.

Virtual news reports are going to become popular, but we have a long way to go. The reports still look too much like Max Headroom. Once the 3D imaging becomes more fluid, they will take off. The key question that runs through my mind is this. If a virtual reporter can report the news in a compelling way and it's all all automated, what does that mean for PR professionals? Here's today's News at Seven report. If you're reading this in your RSS reader, click through to view the clip.

Comments

[David Brazeal]

You really think this is going to take off, Steve? The fact that the avatars look Max Headroom-like is the least of the problems with this report. To me, it sounds silly, it's boring, and the algorithm didn't even pull interesting stories.

Worse yet, even if it were technically exquisite, I have a hard time seeing why anyone would prefer to watch a computer-generated anchor instead of just scanning Google News. What's the attraction? (If the attraction is that we can make the virtual anchor sexy, then why not just skip the news portion and start a different kind of website altogether?)

What am I missing here?