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The Chicago Tribune Phil Rosenthal Media column
[August 27, 2006]

The Chicago Tribune Phil Rosenthal Media column


(Chicago Tribune (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Aug. 27--Used to be the biggest problem for those of us in the media was that people sometimes responded to bad news with the urge to kill the messenger. The biggest problem for us now is that it may be increasingly tough finding a messenger to kill.



Just in the past week came word that about a quarter of the newsroom employees at Ohio's Akron Beacon Journal will lose their jobs. Down in Texas, dozens of reporters, editors and columnists at the Dallas Morning News are signing up for buyouts as the paper looks to trim its staff. Sigh.

Oh, and if that weren't enough, it turns out that in recent months Thomson Financial, the business information group behind the First Call service for investors, has begun using computers rather than journalists to produce many of its stories.


Thomson's computers can churn out an earnings story less than a second after a company makes results public. Faster than you can say, "Open the pod bay doors, Hal," it rifles through the company's database and compares actual performance to analyst expectations and writes out a perfectly adequate if unspectacular report.

"It processes very fast but that's not the thing," explained Andrew Meagher, director of content development for Thomson, and presumably a real person. "It allows us to cover the whole market in a virtual real-time manner, which you just couldn't do unless you had hundreds and hundreds of journalists [to] go across the seven-odd thousand companies that we have information on and produce stories on all of them in real time as information is available."

One's head starts spinning at the thought of how this program, developed with San Francisco's UpTick Data Technologies, could be used to churn out routine news stories or even, gasp, certain columns.

Fortunately, Meagher said it's not time to check the "Curmudgeon Wanted" classifieds yet. Thomson, it turns out, is actually adding journalists. The computer program can sense when Wall Street sentiment has changed concerning a company, he said. But it has no idea why.

"If you take Tribune Co., for example, if analyst estimates are going up, it wouldn't explain that ... [billionaire] Nelson Peltz now has a stake or something," Meagher said. "It just tells you that analysts are seeing something in the market that's causing movement.

"Now if you're just an algorithmic trader ... you don't care about reasons. But for the broader investment community, for retail brokers who have to explain what's going on to their clients, you need people in there who will do that work for them. So [the computer] frees up journalists from having to do the mundane data entry and lets them actually create something that's of a bit more value."

Phew. Guess it's not time to unplug the messenger just yet.

This item wasn't written by computer: Going into the fall TV season, Nielsen Media Research, which measures viewership so ad rates can be set, has upped its estimate of the nation's audience by 1.1 percent, to 283.5 million viewers.

Chicago remains the nation's No. 3 market, behind New York and Los Angeles, but has added 24,230 households. That means a local household rating point now will represent 34,550 TV homes.

Notably, Boston fell from fifth to seventh, behind San Francisco and Dallas, and post-Katrina New Orleans slid from No. 43 to 54, having lost more than 105,000 TV homes.

Fourteen seconds of fame: Dick Askin, who heads the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, which administers the Emmy Awards, told critics recently he doesn't think dubious nominations cast a pall on Sunday's proceedings.

"I believe that the Emmy nominations really represent the best works that were submitted that were evaluated for last season," said Askin, former head of Tribune Entertainment, which like this paper, is part of Tribune Co.

So Askin doesn't believe the TV industry's best self-promotion opportunity has been undermined by bizarre nominations.

Like Ellen Burstyn's nomination for best supporting actress in HBO's "Mrs. Harris."

The woman is onscreen 14 seconds.

"I'm not sure that the viewer really does care [about the nomination controversies]," said Ken Ehrlich, the ex-WTTW-Ch. 11 "Soundstage" producer overseeing NBC's Emmy telecast. "The viewer tunes in a show like this because of the entertainment value."

Well ... people do love a good farce.

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