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Automation

In both news gathering and production/distribution, automation can be divided into three separate but parallel aspects. These include newspaper automation of both layout and printing, broadcast automation of studio operations, and more general automation of news writing, editing, and distribution functions across media platforms. Naturally, there has been a progression of convergence among these three aspects of automation as the technologies of printing, broadcasting, and news gathering move several different technologies into common digital platforms. Both journalists and the general public have maintained a neutral view concerning the impact of news automation, praising the efficiency, speed, and control it allows, while remaining guarded about its negative effect on the workforce, the growing reliance on technology, and a continued conglomeration of news outlets into fewer corporations. Most powerfully, news automation has long been a self-reinforcing cycle, with one form of automation leading to the adoption of another.

News automation has had an enormous impact on all forms of news gathering as well as entertainment productions. Automation continues to be a driving force across all electronic media. At one extreme, news automation can be considered a form of “strong” technological determinism, whereby the techniques and technologies used in a process become the driving factors in the content produced. For example, newsroom automation and other technical advantages have made realtime satellite uplinks and downlinks commonplace. Frequent use of several direct satellite connections is now perceived as a necessity for many television newscasts. The ubiquity of the technology begins to control not only the format but also the content of news gathering and production. However, built-in checks and balances, particularly editorial oversight and professional adherence to journalistic and ethical standards, remain a balancing factor in news automation both now and into the future. This balancing of editorial standards with the effects of technology is referred to as “weak” technological determinism, where news automation is one of many social and cultural factors which have pronounced effects on news gathering and production but do not control form and content. Other examples of technological determinism include the addition of complex moving graphics to broadcast journalism, the publication of zoned editions of metropolitan daily newspapers, portable in-field production and editing in radio news, and the expectation of frequent updates and headlines in all news media.

A continuing argument regarding news automation is that it inherently created the 24-hour news cycle. This would be an example of strong technological determinism, stating that the technological advances in journalism drove the society that produced them to find newsworthy events more frequently in order to create content for ubiquitous news media. The counter argument in favor of weak technological determinism is that as societies grow larger and more sophisticated they create both more information and the technological means for easy gathering and mass distribution of this information. However, both arguments agree that there is an expectation by both society and professional journalists for speed as well as accuracy in news gathering that did not exist before industrial automation.

Automation in Print Media

In print journalism, automation of the printing process in turn created the need to automate and streamline the editorial process in order to take full advantage of the opportunities of faster print times. From the late nineteenth through the twentieth century, the process of typesetting, printing, and finishing newspapers and magazines was increasingly mechanized. This process began with the labor-intensive procedure that required editorial staff to first arrange, then proof the typesetting placed on the print sheet. With the development of mechanized presses, precision manufacturing, and print-finishing (folding and binding), printers no longer had to feed individual sheets into presses, making creation of larger newspapers—and more of them—fast and fairly inexpensive. As printing times shortened, editorial roles adapted to allow more last minute deadlines and coordinated drop-shipping of finished newspapers. With each technological advance, the trend of shorter and shorter production schedules, driven by commercial competition, continued. The technical evolution of print automation included the linotype, which allowed for faster mechanized typesetting; off-set lithography, which allowed images to be printed from reusable plates; and rotary presses and flex-ography; which used flexible rubberized or silicone plates that curve as they print their image onto paper rolls. Each of these technological advances allowed for more rapid and increasingly sophisticated typography, higher-quality illustrations and photographs, and faster layout of individual print runs. These physical printing processes were collectively referred to a “hot printing.” In the 1940s the process of phototypesetting, or “cold printing,” was perfected. It involved making photonegative images of typesetting and illustrations that were then transferred directly to curved silicone plates for printing. Again, this process made page layout faster, necessitating increased automation of editorial oversight.

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