The Associated Press will become the latest of media companies to implement “automation technology,” which they will use for what’s essentially the grunt work of financial journalism—essentially, AP has just created robot reporters that will be able to crunch millions of corporate numbers and come up with an earnings report in seconds.
AP’s new “automation technology” will be used to write specific kinds of financial reports or corporate earnings stories—mostly collections of data and only a few lines of text. With the robots crunching all of the numbers, AP’s financial journalists will have time to concentrate more heavily on actual analysis of the earnings.
AP’s new automation technology is pretty similar to systems implemented by other media companies: essentially, AP’s new robot reporters will use algorithms that can input raw corporate earnings data and put out a story within a couple of seconds, stories that actually meet the standard journalistic style.
“For many years, we have been spending a lot of time crunching numbers and rewriting information from companies to publish approximately 300 earnings reports each quarter,” said AP managing editor Lou Ferrara, on AP’s blog. “We discovered that automation technology … would allow us to automate short stories – 150 to 300 words — about the earnings of companies in roughly the same time that it took our reporters.”
AP estimates this will greatly increase their efficiency and production, allowing them to issue nearly 5,000 earnings reports each quarter rather than the 300 reports they normally manage. Which is probably really great news for those reporters—even financial journalists can’t possibly want to crunch sheets of numbers all day long.
Source Discovery
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