Automation can free up journalists to focus more on reporting

Last August I decided to hire a journalist to produce content for a project. This person would help me with social media posts, newsletters and reports, with the goal of providing other journalists with scientific knowledge coming from social media. After a few weeks, having worked on the budget and the targets I had in mind, I pivoted the whole plan and hired two part-time developers to create a Twitter bot and an automated report delivery system. In one stroke, I solved two problems: feeding my project's Twitter timeline and providing newsletter content for the users. After the launch, no human hands needed to touch those two streams of content. It was a classic scenario in which automation literally stole a journalist's job.