[thisisit]

Hi Anu,

Most probably this might not get a reply but I still wanted to know about this statement - "During the 2016 Olympics, a Toutiao bot wrote original news coverage, publishing stories on major events more quickly than traditional media outlets. The bot-written articles enjoyed read rates (# of reads and # of impressions) in line with those produced at a slower speed and higher cost by human writers on average."

1. What does writing original news coverage entail? Did the bot put together couple of news source to create an article or do you mean it transcribed the news from the live video feed as it happened?

2. How much of the bot feed works due to high declension? [1]. Because normally bot structure and output tend to make less sense as the sentence structure comes out all wrong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension

Additionally, there is quite a lot of focus on getting user to stay on the platform. Not to sound alarmist here but doesn't it mean you are most of the time helping people reinforce their world views? News should be reported as is but then if user engagement is so important news will be written right or left wing just to keep the user on platform.

[anuh]

First, writing stories on Olympic game results required data, and Toutiao pulled it from three sources: [a] real time score updates from the Olympics organization, [b] images from an image-gathering-company it had recently acquired to find relevant visual media, and [c] monitoring live text commentary about the game. Second, Toutiao had to figure out how to combine data from these three sources to ensure an internally consistent and relevant story. As a result of these efforts they were able to publish news story of a game approximately 2 seconds after the event ended as they collected and processed the information as the game progressed. In Toutiao's case news is the element with which they launched but today there is a lot more reason why users use the app (much beyond news). Local news, weather, information on agriculture, etc. are surfaced regularly which is why the app is quite popular nationally in China and not just in Beijing and Shanghai.