In 2011, I sat in the Guggenheim Museum in New York and watched Rupert Murdoch announce the beginning of a "new digital renaissance" for news. The newspaper mogul was unveiling an iPad-inspired publication called The Daily. "The iPad demands that we completely reimagine our craft," he said. The Daily shut down the following year, after burning through a reported 40 million. For as long as I have reported on internet companies, I have watched news leaders try to bend their businesses to the will of Apple, Google, Meta, and more.

"The advent of the internet and the subsequent information explosion has made it increasingly challenging for journalists to produce news accurately and swiftly." So begin the research and development team at the global news agency Reuters in a paper on the arXiv this week. For Reuters, the problem has been made more acute by the emergence of fake news as an important factor in distorting the perception of events. Nevertheless, news agencies such as the Associated Press have moved ahead with automated news writing services. These report standard announcements such as financial news and certain sports results by pasting the data into pre-written templates: "X reported profit of Y million in Q3, in results that beat Wall Street forecasts ... " So there is significant pressure on other news agencies to automate news production.

"The advent of the internet and the subsequent information explosion has made it increasingly challenging for journalists to produce news accurately and swiftly." So begin the research and development team at the global news agency Reuters in a paper on the arXiv this week. For Reuters, the problem has been made more acute by the emergence of fake news as an important factor in distorting the perception of events. Nevertheless, news agencies such as the Associated Press have moved ahead with automated news writing services. These report standard announcements such as financial news and certain sports results by pasting the data into pre-written templates: "X reported profit of Y million in Q3, in results that beat Wall Street forecasts ... " So there is significant pressure on other news agencies to automate news production. And today, Reuters outlines how it has almost entirely automated the identification of breaking news stories.

These days, I feel as lucky as an EPA official emerging unscathed from a road trip through Logan County in a car plastered with "Hillary" stickers simply to continue having a job as a newspaper reporter. There are not a lot of employment opportunities for the 21st Century's equivalent of the town crier, especially if, like me, you are old, technology challenged and live in a state with an economy that's escaped do-not-resuscitate orders only because its Legislature can't agree on the wording. While Career Cast's 2016 Jobs Rated Report listed newspaper reporter as the worst job in America for the third consecutive year, thanks mainly to a -9 percent projected growth rate, high on-the-job stress and low pay, I still enjoy coming to work. It's a job that's rarely boring, always challenging, and puts me in contact with a cast of characters in an array of settings I would never encounter had I pursued the only other marketable skill I developed during my life -- hay baling. I'm also lucky to be working for a company that still considers its main purpose to be publishing a newspaper, albeit one with video, interactive and online components, and not, as the company formerly known as Tribune Publishing described itself in a press release last week, a "content curation and monetization company focused on creating and distributing premium, verified content across all channels."