Turning News Into Knowledge

Last couple of decades, technology has more or less taken over our life, it dictates how we access information, how we make decisions – be it about buying the next pair of shoes or meeting our potential life partner, how we do business and how we socialize. No aspect of our life has been left behind.

The dependence on technology is even more intense in our business life. There is a drive to automate as much as possible. In countries where manpower comes at premium, automation is defined both by innovation and by need.

While there are many benefits to automation and undoubtedly a move in the right direction, caution needs to be exercised in its implementation.

Talking specifically, in the context of media measurement and analysis, there are many sophisticated tools to choose from and these tools and software no doubt improve the reliability, efficiency and have the ability to crunch mass volumes in minutes.

However, for any meaningful analysis the contribution of an analyst to understand the context, tone and to simply judge the relevancy of media coverage cannot and should not be underestimated. The tools are helpful aids, but that’s what they are. To assume that an automated software will pick up the right media coverage based on keywords; will judge the tonality of the coverage based on positive and negative word recognition; will gain the understanding of the context or will understand the dynamics of the various forces in play would be a harmful assumption.

A recent post by Katie Paine highlights some of these issues especially the reliance on automated sentiment analysis or the reliance on web crawlers to pick up the right content.

At MediaMiser we believe, “computers compute and humans analyze.” That is why when we sell our software we also have a strong analyst team backing up the software.

Sure our software does a great job of picking up all your keywords but it is our analyst which filters the relevant content from all the junk that is pulled in which sometimes as Katie Paine rightly points out could be 90% of the content. When it comes to toning the articles MediaMiser analysts read through each article based on pre-determined toning parameters discussed with the clients.

Time and again we have received feedback from our clients as to how valuable they find our contribution of manual vetting, toning and analytical insights. It is ultimately the thinking of humans and not the logic of machines that gets the “job done right.”

So to question ‘Can technology think?’ I have only one answer… “NO”