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This will be the last issue in which you will see names above stories in the sports section. I’ve fired all of my writers and found a much better, simpler and more efficient way to deliver sports journalism to you.
Some students at Northwestern University have developed a computer program that can write sports stories using information readily available online, such as the box score, the play-by-play description and even quotes from other online stories.
The program is called “Stats Monkey” and, according to Northwestern’s Web site, it was invented to eventually be used by news organizations. We at The Orion would be smart to use this program to cover all of the university’s sports games.
Think of the possibilities. No longer would The Orion have to waste time and money in expending effort to send writers to games to provide students with detailed, eyewitness descriptions backed up by substantial, original quotes. Now we can just give readers a nicely packaged regurgitation of the box score.
With Stats Monkey, The Orion wouldn’t have to waste students’ time by printing fun, light-hearted stories about Chico traditions such as Walter Ford’s story about the Normal Street Bar dodgeball tournament.
Let’s get real, here. This program isn’t producing sports journalism. It’s not even close. Stats Monkey doesn’t do anything but fill space on a page with bland stories for readers who are too lazy to just look at a box score.
Sports writers could easily produce the kind of drivel this program punches out, but most of them choose not to because it is lifeless, uninformative and uninteresting to let a play-by-play description tell the story.
What if the game ends on an amazing slide into home plate in a game with playoff implications? What if the umpire’s call at home plate is controversial? How could a computer program have accurately described the drama around Matt Holliday’s famous chin-cutting slide into home during the game against the San Diego Padres on Oct. 1, 2007?
It couldn’t. That part of the story can’t be provided by a box score and a simple sweep of existing stories. A machine can’t understand the emotion involved in sports, which is what makes them news worthy to begin with. Instead, the computer program would have mistakenly reported that the most interesting play of that 2007 game was Jamey Carroll’s line drive to shallow right field that drove Holiday in.
The program the students at Northwestern created does a disservice to actual journalism and should be boycotted. Before creating another program like Stats Monkey, these students should consider what Chico State President Paul Zingg told an Orion reporter a few weeks ago, “sports are so much more than statistics.”
Phil can be reached at
sportseditor@theorion.com
