This media start-up is beating competition with a newsroom run by robots

On February 13 last year, the half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un was killed in an airport in Malaysia, in what the US Department of State concluded was an assassination using a nerve agent. As North Korea and Malaysia were roiled in a diplomatic dispute, one entrepreneur in Japan and his budding news service were about to reap some attention.

News of Kim Jong-Nam’s death was quickly picked up in Japan not by one of the country’s giant media conglomerates, but by a small startup. JX Press Corp., a news technology venture founded in 2008 by Katsuhiro Yoneshige while he was still a freshman in college, reported the incident more than half an hour faster than the big names, according to one observer. It did so even though it has no journalists, let alone any international bureaus.

"NewsDigest got the scoop at 19:52, and TV stations had it about 20:30," sociologist Noritoshi Furuichi wrote on Twitter after reports of Kim’s death. "Television has succumbed to being a slow media."

JX Press’s secret, it turns out, is a combination of social media and artificial intelligence. Yoneshige and his team have developed a tool, using machine learning, for finding breaking news in social media posts and writing it up as news reports. Essentially, it’s a newsroom staffed by engineers.
 

NewsDigest’s reporting on Kim Jong-Nam “was much talked about among TV stations in Tokyo,” Yoneshige said. “We got lots of inquiries from media institutions. They wanted to try our system.”

Yoneshige, now 29, realized the perilous situation of Japanese media when he was writing for an airline news website while still in middle and high school. The industry is too heavily staffed and doesn’t make enough money, he says.Yoneshige’s startup is an example of how entrepreneurs are harnessing social media to create businesses.