The automated sports journalist?

Poynter Online's Jeremy Gilbert has a fascinating article about innovative student efforts to make technology work for the journalism industry.  

As the article explains, five teams of (presumably brilliant) students at Northwestern's Medill journalism school spent the semester creating ingenious solutions to industry-specific problems. The final projects of all five groups were interesting, but the one most intriguing to me as a sports fan and journalist was Machine Generated Sports Stories. 

The idea of this project is to craft a computer program that will generate baseball game stories using massive amounts of statistics and box scores and without the aid of humans.  Using a probability formula called "Win Probability Added," the computer will even be able to identify the single play that impacted the outcome of the game most--in other words, the most important play. 

Creators of the the idea say that it will save sportswriters from drafting formulaic and mundane game stories, which are essentially summaries of the action, so that they can focus on opinions and human interest elements.  

Intriguing and high tech, no doubt, but is a development like this really beneficial to journalism?  With journalism jobs incredibly scare already, should we really support the mechanization of actual story writing? As a lover of expertly crafted game stories, I am skeptical that a computer will ever be able to do the job with the panache, flair and quality that a veteran sports journalist can.