Automated News Comes To Sports Coverage Via StatSheet

Here come the robo sports journalists. While people in the media biz worry about content mills like Demand Media and Associated Content spitting out endless SEO-targeted articles written by low-paid Internet writers, at least those articles are still written by humans. We may no longer need the humans, at least for data-driven stories. A startup in North Carolina, StatSheet , today is launching a remarkable network of 345 sports sites, one dedicated to each Division 1 college basketball tam in the U.S. For instance, there is a site for the Michigan State Spartans , North Carolina Tar Heels , and Ohio Buckeyes . Every story on each site was written by a robot, or to put it more precisely, by StatSheet's content algorithms. "The posts are completely auto-generated," says founder Robbie Allen. "The only human involvement is with creating the algorithms that generate the posts."