Guess we’re seeing the final death knell of the hard-hitting, hard-drinking newspaper reporter.

Turns out that the Los Angeles Times recently got an article about an earthquake to print (actually, to web) in three minutes using an algorithm leeching data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Crime stories are similarly culled without the intervention of human hands — unless the story turns out to be a big one.

You can credit one journalist and programmer named Ken Schwencke with writing the code to put more journalists out of work.

“The way I see it is, it doesn’t eliminate anybody’s job as much as it makes everybody’s job more interesting,” Schwencke says.

Yeah, right, if you still have a job.