This post describes the algorithm in question.
Here's a link to the story:
A shallow magnitude 2.7 earthquake aftershock was reported Monday morning four miles from Westwood, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The temblor occurred at 7:23 a.m. Pacific time at a depth of 4.3 miles.
A magnitude 4.4 earthquake was reported at 6.25 a.m. and was felt over a large swath of Southern California.
According to the USGS, the epicenter of the aftershock was five miles from Beverly Hills, six miles from Santa Monica and six miles from West Hollywood.
In the last 10 days, there has been one earthquake of magnitude 3.0 or greater centered nearby.
This information comes from the USGS Earthquake Notification Service and this post was created by an algorithm written by the author.
The program used to generate it was called Quakebot.
Ken Schwencke, a journalist and programmer for the Los Angeles Times, was jolted awake at 6:25 a.m. on Monday by an earthquake. He rolled out of bed and went straight to his computer, where he found a brief story about the quake already written and waiting in the system. He glanced over the text and hit “publish.” And that’s how the LAT became the first media outlet to report on this morning’s temblor. “I think we had it up within three minutes,” Schwencke told me.
If that sounds faster than humanly possible, it probably is. While the post appeared under Schwencke’s byline, the real author was an algorithm called Quakebot that he developed a little over two years ago. Whenever an alert comes in from the U.S. Geological Survey about an earthquake above a certain size threshold, Quakebot is programmed to extract the relevant data from the USGS report and plug it into a pre-written template. The story goes into the LAT’s content management system, where it awaits review and publication by a human editor.
Computer programming is now a useful skill for journalists apparently.
