Three eye-opening articles about three very different kinds of content

For those of you who weren’t at the SCRT meeting on Tuesday, we tentatively agreed to co-host (with the Emerging Technologies Committee and very likely others) an event on new and pervasive forms of content that don’t tend to get a lot of librarian attention: instructional/practical information from content farms, algorithm-written news stories, etc.

If you’re interested in these topics, I highly recommend these articles (I found them all to be page-turners), brought to our attention by Ann Matsuuchi:

“The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model.”
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia/all/

“Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?”
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/04/can-an-algorithm-write-a-better-news-story-than-a-human-reporter/all/

“He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work)”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/business/media/14link.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

-Jill