If everyone could just email their PR pieces to a common techcrunch email address, someone could write a bit of code to check any links and then bung the text and pictures into an article template on the homepage.

Just to start (I call it BotoCrunch)

Mailgun In -> TextTeaser API [1] -> Mailgun Out to reader mailing list/Deploy to S3 site.

https://www.mashape.com/mojojolo/textteaser [1]

TechCrunch has explored the topic of automated journalism numerous times; here's one example:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/12/automated-news-sports-stats...

If there's a point behind your sarcasm, I'm not getting it. Would you mind fleshing it out a bit?

Everyone else's job seems easy until you actually learn something about it.

Except there are lots of examples of successful train automation -- the article mentions several.

Plus, the author may not have initially known much about how hard it is to run a train, but they weren't expressing their own opinions -- they found experts and asked them how hard it would be.

It's lazy and disingenuous to pretend anyone involved in the article was expressing opinions about things they knew nothing about.