I'm disappointed that the Communications of ACM articles didn't even touch on any of the issues I've raised. The ACM has taken a leading role on social and political issues in computing, but this particular feature shows none of that influence. The articles focus narrowly and repetitiously on particular technical hurdles faced by the researchers on various projects. And so I laugh when I see so many research systems struggling to classify news broadcasts through speech recognition. Speech recognition is a critical research area, but this particular application doesn't seem worth the effort.
News broadcasts consist mostly of staff reading from written scripts.
Spontaneous comments from people interviewed on the air make a critical contribution to the shows, but the topics and context can easily be gathered from the scripts. More generally, I like the idea of being exposed to news and ideas I didn't think were important before. That's why I still read my local papers, not to mention listening to news shows on the radio and reading a lot of technical publications online and offline. One of the big advantages of a well-edited publication is that you learn things that somebody else thinks is important, not just things you already knew were important. Being an editor myself, I'm gratified to see that editors still play a key role in keeping people educated.