Well, this sounds like the nightmarish end-game that many journalists fear. From Netimperative:

Tewspaper, an ‘online newspaper with no writers’, has launched in the U.S., using an algorithm that scours social media sites for relevant news links.

The site employs the concept of ‘crowdsourcing’ – using popular comments posted on social media sites such as Twitter – to distribute relevant news to readers of local newspaper sites in five U.S. cities.

Tewspaper uses publicly available APIs to automatically trawl social media sites for local news covering Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and New York City.

When I see the bots trawling bars in those cities, then I’ll be convinced they can replace real journalists. In the meantime, Liz Webber, writing at editorsweblog.org (a publication of the World Editors Forum), says journos shouldn’t assume the worst:

At first glance, the tagline and premise for Tewspaper – “The online newspaper with no writers” – might ruffle some mainstream media feathers. Another online aggregator coming to mine my content as it pleases? That hardly seems right.

Upon closer examination, however, Tewspaper actually could help drive traffic to the sources it uses. That’s because the site aggregates not news articles but tweets – tweets mostly from major news organizations, keeping intact the shortened links to the original articles. What the user sees is exactly what the media source sent out, just organized in a way Tewspaper chooses.

Webber cites some of Tewspaper’s obvious design problems (it has no design; just stacks of boxes, some with photos and others just with text) and notes the site doesn’t have any ads (yet), thus no ad revenue.

An interesting experiment or a harbinger of doom for journalists? We’ll see.