Are robots and content farms the future of the news?

There was some consternation in the media industry this week when the Chicago Tribune announced that it was letting more than 20 of its journalists go and handing over its local coverage to an outfit called Journatic, which looked to some like a “content farm” not unlike AOL’s hyper-local Patch unit. Meanwhile, Wired magazine wrote about another emerging competitor for the traditional news business — namely, the news-writing robots or algorithms employed by startup Narrative Science, which automatically generate sports and business stories. Is this what the future of the media industry looks like? Robots and content farms?