Reporters are used to bad news. Tornadoes just rampaged through Kansas? Get out there and interview the now-homeless survivors. Teenager just drove a motorcycle into a telephone pole? Survey the wreckage and ask his classmates if they can give you quotes between their sobs.

Reporting is tough business, and reporters need thick skins to deal with it. But in recent years, professional journos have now also become accustomed to bad news directed squarely at them. As the New York Times reported late last month, newspapers across the country continue to hemorrhage circulation. The magazine industry is on the verge of collapse. As readership online continues to surge, that uptick in traffic hasn’t translated to increased revenues for news organizations yet, and there’s no guarantee it ever will.

As if the Fourth Estate’s financial future wasn’t bleak enough already, they just received a new slap in the face – software that can write new stories. As you can see for yourself in this sports story-based demonstration in Bloomberg, it does a more than passable job replicating human-authored news articles. Can you tell which one is the “fake”? Neither could I.

As a former reporter with friends still doing incredible, and incredibly important, work in the trenches of journalism, a possible future devoid of real reporting performed by actual people is a depressing one. But whatever tomorrow may hold for my former profession, the truth has never been more clear – in a world of ever-dwindling newsrooms, companies that want or need to reach the public masses have an obligation unto themselves and their shareholders to find other means of doing so. New media – be that Twitter, viral videos, Facebook, blogs, and so on – must surely be a large component of that.