The Associated Press announced a partnership with Automated Insights to automate the writing of approximately 300 earnings reports per quarter using automation technology. This will allow AP to generate up to 4,400 automated stories for US companies each quarter, compared to the previous manual production of around 300 stories. The move aims to free up journalists' time spent on data processing and refocus their efforts on reporting. The automation technology can generate stories at a rate of nearly 10 per second.

1. WHEN YOU MAKE A DEAL
WITH THE ASSOCIATED
PRESS . . .
PEOPLE TAKE NOTICE.

2. AP ANNOUNCED A “LEAP
FORWARD” FOR
EARNINGS STORIES
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. 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.
And instead of providing 300 stories manually, we can provide up
to 4,400 automatically for companies throughout the United
States each quarter.
– Lou Ferrara, VP and Managing Editor, AP

3. “The Associated Press welcomes its robot
journalist overlords” - Engadget
“How robots will write earnings stories
for the AP” – USA Today
“Need to Write 5 Million Stories a Week?
Robot Reporters to the Rescue” - Mashable
“Bring on the Blogging Robots” - TechCrunch

4. “Not only am I not scared of
losing my job to a piece of
software, I think the
introduction of automated
reporting is the best thing to
happen to journalists in a long
time.”- New York Magazine

5. “This kind of technological
breakthrough has long been
predicted . . .”
- The Guardian

6. “The company has since
raised its total capital to
$10.8 million, producing
over 300 million stories in
2013 alone, making it the
world’s largest producer
of automated narrative content.”
- Fox News

7. “The Associated Press says it will use
algorithm-generated content from
Automated Insights to produce earnings
reports, which has some professional
journalists nervous about robots taking
their jobs — but in reality such drudgery is
better off being done by algorithms than by
human beings”
- Gigaom

8. “The efficiency
of these algorithms
is quite impressive:
In 2013, Automated
Insights published
nearly 10 stories a
second…”
– The Atlantic
Image: Logan Ingalls / Flickr

9. “We’re still going to cover earnings season,”
[AP Managing Editor Lou Ferrara] said. “What
I’m trying to get out of is the data processing
business.
I can’t have journalists spending a ton of time
data processing stuff. Instead I need them
reporting.”
- Poynter

10. Image: Mashable Composite.
Getty Creative
“Wordsmith does it [content
variability] pretty much the way a
human would: by varying story
structure, using different
phraseology and, where possible,
incorporating historical anecdotes.” -
Mashable

11. “It’s a dance between writing,
coding, and data analysis”-The
Verge

12. “So bring on the
goddamn robots, I say.”
- TechCrunch
Image: Chris Isherwood / Flickr

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