LA Times the first to publish report by bot

The Los Angeles Times was the first to publish a story about yesterday's earthquake in Los Angeles, thanks to a robot writer.

The Times used a computer algorithm to automatically generate a short article on the quake.

This was the article:

A shallow magnitude 4.7 earthquake was reported Monday morning five miles from Westwood, California, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The temblor occurred at 6:25 a.m. Pacific time at a depth of 5.0 miles.

According to the USGS, the epicenter was six miles from Beverly Hills, California, seven miles from Universal City, California, seven miles from Santa Monica, California and 348 miles from Sacramento, California. In the past ten days, there have been no earthquakes magnitude 3.0 and greater centered nearby.

This information comes from the USGS Earthquake Notification Service and this post was created by an algorithm written by the author.

The journalist who wrote the programme said it was not designed to replace human staff, but to publish data quickly.

A number of major US newsrooms are experimenting with so-called "robo-journalism" for sports and crime coverage.