news-record.com

GREENSBORO -- Here's a first for this year's ACC men's basketball tournament.

A Durham company called StatSheet will produce two stories on every contest, one targeted for each team's fans, on its website at www.statsheet.com. Plus, it will turn out injury reports, game notes, charts, previews, box scores and updates.

And it is doing the same for every other NCAA Division I conference tournament in the country. Every game. For the rest of the season. And beyond.

The catch?

All the content will be produced by robo-reporters.

Granted, that's not a term the company's founder, Robbie Allen, a Burlington native, especially likes.

"I like robots; we embrace robots ... we're all about robots," Allen said in a recent interview. "(But) I don't know about the term robo-journalism."

He prefers automated content.

That means the stories StatSheet produces are computer-generated. But, Allen says, that doesn't mean the company wants to dehumanize journalism.

"We think it is the opposite," said Allen, a former Cisco Systems engineer who lives in Cary. "We are humanizing big data. We are trying to turn all those statistics into something that humans can read more readily."

Allen and his nine-person staff began turning out computer-generated stories in November. He did it on a network of 345 websites he established -- one for every NCAA Division I basketball team in the country.

He has given each website a name and a robo-mascot and stuffed them with more stats than the average fan can comprehend.

This spring, Allen will launch websites for all NBA and Major League Baseball teams. This fall, he'll add college and professional football. Next year, he'll broaden his coverage of NASCAR.

StatSheet may expand into financial coverage.

"Beyond that, we can't say," Allen said. "We just have to wait and see."

This month, just covering NCAA basketball, StatSheet will turn out 18,000 computer-generated stories.

Here's how it works:

Allen can take the statistics from a game, which he purchases from a company in Philadelphia, and using algorithms, turn that data into stories.

Algorithms are a series of computer instructions that derive meaning out of data.

"We take those meanings that we got out of the data, and we wrap words around them," Allen said. "We had to write some fairly complex software to do this."

As an example, here's the lead of one of the StatSheet stories from Saturday's Duke-Carolina game: "North Carolina has ended a great regular season with a lot of momentum. On March 5th in their own building, the Tar Heels upset the Blue Devils 81-67."

Such efforts have produced mixed reviews.

"Those stat-heavy stories are brief and bland -- more Minute Rice than Grantland Rice," Steve Rushin wrote in Sports Illustrated. "... But the stories are also clean and completely composed. The robot is not yet funny like Jim Murray or lyrical like Red Smith, but it does make -- like Oscar Madison -- a convincing nonexistent reporter."

Allen isn't put off by such commentary.

He holds two degrees from MIT and has written several technical books as well as a blog on Tar Heels basketball. He knows his nouns, verbs and algorithms.

"My writing is not going to improve a lot," said Allen, 34. "(But) our software can constantly be improved. So we don't have that limitation."

As its stories improve and coverage expands, Allen says, StatSheet doesn't want to put writers out of business.

"Nobody has done automated content on the scale we have," he said. "(But) it's hard for robots to write about Tiger Woods' infidelities."

Contact Donald W. Patterson at 373-7037 or don.patterson@news-record.com