For all the upsides that social media can bring to your business, there still remains a great deal of uncertainty and misconceptions about what social media can actually accomplish in terms of overall business growth. Far too often, high (read: mismanaged) expectations can lead to disappointment, even frustration with the mechanism.

Narrative Science takes key facts and adds in connective sentences so a story makes sense. This college football report (American football, not football) was generated using NS’s algorithms. It’s not Pulitzer Prize winning material, but it’s factually accurate, informative and functionally does the job of creating a short match report.

What our poor, overworked, underpaid, technology-crazed editor has completely forgotten is the purpose of journalism. Which is, to make sense of a bewildering array of events for people.

We're supposed to give them a manageable digest of events — national, state and local, plus some good reading and useful information. Nobody wants to read a whole goddamn city council agenda. Nobody human wants to look at video of residents at a city council meeting, except those who care enough to go.

The internet has changed patterns of supply and demand in media businesses in profound ways. We're not going back to the way things used to be. But it's a mistake to assume that the contours of the landscape in the immediate aftermath of the disruption are the permanent contours of the landscape.