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AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

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Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#41

Post by pavel_lishin »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #11

This just makes me think: why in the world would any one want to become a writer these days? There isn't much money in it, unless you get lucky and hit it big. I understanding having a passion, but this is one passion that should be relegated to hobby time. Am I wrong on this? I'm just not seeing the economic viability of writing sentences and having people (whether readers or advertisers) paying you proportionate to…

Maybe they're not motivated by money. Maybe they'd rather make $35k doing what they love full-time, rather than only do it as a hobby.

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#42

Post by ChuckMcM »

spaghetti wrote: post #27
dpapathanasiou wrote: post #25

“Do you guys even CARE what I write? Does it make any difference if it’s good or bad?” I said. “Not really,” was the reply. If he had any programming background, he missed a golden opportunity to write a markov text generator which would have let him meet his deadlines without the stress.

You beat me to it :-). I'm curious to what extent this is being done today.

In the SEO world you come across entire forum sites of imaginary users all talking about $SEOTarget product and how create $TargetWebSite is all amongst their little markov robot selves.

The goal is to create links which rank highly and raise the target in search results for search engines.

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#44

Post by stevenj »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #11

This just makes me think: why in the world would any one want to become a writer these days? There isn't much money in it, unless you get lucky and hit it big. I understanding having a passion, but this is one passion that should be relegated to hobby time. Am I wrong on this? I'm just not seeing the economic viability of writing sentences and having people (whether readers or advertisers) paying you proportionate to…

Funny you say that, 'cause people tell me the same thing about startups.

But as Bezos once said: "You don't choose your passions. Your passions choose you."

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#45

Post by technomancy »

SemanticFog wrote: post #21

There's nothing unique to AOL here. When I first got out of college, I interviewed at local newspapers up and down the east coast. Entry level jobs had awful pay, about $15K/yr, but it was a chance to break in to the business. One grizzled editor chain smoked cigarettes through our interview (you could do that in the office back then). He listened to me describe why I wanted to write. Then he leaned back, blew a clou…

> There's nothing unique to AOL here.

Except perhaps the scale.

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#46

Post by mitcheme »

spaghetti wrote: post #26

Just an aside: would have been awesome if the writer created an article generating program. He could feed the program a few key words (perhaps just the name of the TV show). The program could scrape or be manually fed some information from Google trends. Then add some scraping of data from existing articles. Use a markov chain to keep the content fresh and you're good to go! I'm just thinking of the sentence generati…

It would be hilarious but I'm not so sure it would work that well. I think one of the big reasons the scigen papers passed for real was because a lot of people will assume that if they can't understand a paper, it's just gone over their heads. There's enough real jargon in them to reinforce that assumption. Entertainment news is a lot more accessible so it would be pretty obvious.

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#47

Post by zwischenzug »

SemanticFog wrote: post #21

There's nothing unique to AOL here. When I first got out of college, I interviewed at local newspapers up and down the east coast. Entry level jobs had awful pay, about $15K/yr, but it was a chance to break in to the business. One grizzled editor chain smoked cigarettes through our interview (you could do that in the office back then). He listened to me describe why I wanted to write. Then he leaned back, blew a clou…

Not just local papers.

I worked for The (London) Times on a student scholarship back in the mid-90s.

I heard editors telling senior journalists to lie about anti-government movements, and asked to phone up a sister 'paper and lie about calling from another news organisation to find out whether a story was going to be run that weekend.

They offered me a job, but I turned it down. I'd had enough being a machine to generate words at university. I then had to chase them up for payment for my three weeks' work. A measly 150GBP (total) and they tried to screw me out of that.

Ironically I ended up working for Rupert Murdoch in IT again (in a completely separate non-media company - not MySpace) for 10 more years.

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#48

Post by orborde »

hugh3 wrote: post #37
jerf wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously a straight-up Markov Chain generator isn't going to work, but a smarter system that would allow you to basically sketch the article and then have the system automatically babble in English to fill out the word count while not actually needing any additional information strikes me as feasible, though not trivial. Somebody's doing something similar for sports reporting: http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/04/18/…

The Motley Fool also uses automatically-generated articles. For instance if you google the phrase "Being able to retire rich, or at least comfortable, is the goal of almost any investor" you'll find hundreds of articles from fool.com, each posing as an analysis of a particular company, and all generated with an algorithm which is fairly obvious after reading a couple of 'em. They're not completely worthless, though.…

That is disturbingly brilliant.

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#50

Post by zwischenzug »

SemanticFog wrote: post #21

There's nothing unique to AOL here. When I first got out of college, I interviewed at local newspapers up and down the east coast. Entry level jobs had awful pay, about $15K/yr, but it was a chance to break in to the business. One grizzled editor chain smoked cigarettes through our interview (you could do that in the office back then). He listened to me describe why I wanted to write. Then he leaned back, blew a clou…

Not just local papers.

I worked for The (London) Times on a student scholarship back in the mid-90s.

I heard editors telling senior journalists to lie about anti-government movements, and asked to phone up a sister 'paper and lie about calling from another news organisation to find out whether a story was going to be run that weekend.

They offered me a job, but I turned it down. I'd had enough being a machine to generate words at university. I then had to chase them up for payment for my three weeks' work. A measly 150GBP (total) and they tried to screw me out of that.

Ironically I ended up working for Rupert Murdoch in IT again (in a completely separate non-media company - not MySpace) for 10 more years.

I have to say I read this article and thought: isn't this what journos are paid to do?

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