Automation panel

Ken Sands, online publisher at Spokane Review: Automation is key to everything we do. (has 2 web developers) We attempt to automate everything.
Amy Webb of Dragonfire (dfire.com) an award-winning non-profit online newsmagazine affiliated with Drexel University. (1.2 million unique users):
Does multimedia on every big issue. Uses pre-made Flash templates to automate - indeed, she handed out discs with several of them.Image cubesMaster of the winds, Journals of medicinel
Ron Parsons, of Yahoo! News:
Automation is the basis and the strength of Yahoo. Most automated functions are informed by human editors. Also takes note of the wisdom of crowds.But automation does not replace editors. Yahoo news began as almost completely automated. That only takes you so far. It now allows for feeds from dozens of partners, conent flows into appropriate templates and categories. can be automatically published and updated.
Automatically updating slideslows. Automatically generates several sizes of thumbnails of thousands of photos a day. New photos can be edited and added in real time, don't need photo editors to resize images.
It was open source software they tweaked (!) Extractions of stories is based on metadata, slugs, even headlines or lede. Tools sit on top of a system and allow add-ons, editors can modify as need be. RSS feeds automatically create a robust product, automated alerts for stale feeds, bad servers or bad XML alert editors to problems.Engaged enginners. Tools are critical to success of today's newsroom. Need to have lightweight flexible tools (but) editors still rule.
Adrian Holovaty, brilliant database builder, built Chicagocrime.org, the Washington Post's Congressional votes database, and Faces of the Fallen: (first two require NO maintenance unless the databases they pull the information from are changed, Otherwise they just run on their own)Tragedy in journalism is not declining circ, revenue, bias etc, (see his powerpoint presentation here, he whomped through the intro slides to effectively establish the backdrop for his remarks) but rather that we collect all this info an throw it out. Instead of narratives, we should record data in a neat organized way that has consistent meaning to a computer program.
Newspapers have huge infrastructures for collecting information, verifying it and publishing it. But they haven't leveraged the data.
Craig's List and Wikipedia just provided the great frameworks ready for data, users provide it. Newspapers have great data desperate for a framework. If data is automated, then you can automate stuff.
At Lawrence.com, they put everything into a database. Bars and drink specials, what restaurants are open late, local bands, their songs, their gigs, what other bands the musicians play in and what their songs and gigs are, cross referenced to the nightclubs and the specials and all that. So, if you are hungry late at night and want to know what restaurants are open right now, the site can readily tell you.
For Chicagocrime.org, every block in the city has it's own RSS feed pulled from Chicago PD website.
"I spend no time on it. It took 40 hours to make."
Congressional votes database updates six times a day, RSS feed set up for every member of Congress. No time maintaining it. There is an initial cost but no ongoing costs. "the key difference between local journalism and Google (is Google has organized, structured data)."