this is what happens when you automate stories for the ap

WHEN YOU MAKE A DEAL WITH THE ASSOCIATED PRESS . . .

PEOPLE TAKE NOTICE.

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

“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

“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

“This kind of technological breakthrough has long been predicted . . .”

- The Guardian

“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

“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

“The efficiency of these algorithms is quite impressive: In 2013, Automated Insights published nearly 10 stories a second…”

– The Atlantic

Image: Logan Ingalls / Flickr

“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

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

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

“So bring on the goddamn robots, I say.”

- TechCrunch

Image: Chris Isherwood / Flickr

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