The AP’s Newest Business Reporter Is An Algorithm

Journalistic earnings stories can feel robotic, even when written by a news organization as prestigious as the Associated Press. Acknowledging this fact, the AP has decided that it will just have robots produce stories on companies’ earning reports.

The AP announced that it will be moving toward full automation of 150- to 300-word earnings reports. The system, to be rolled out in August, will work by pumping data from Zacks Investment Research into Automated Insights, a firm that specializes in computer-generated prose. Naturally, the reports will still conform to AP style, the system of grammar and word choice that is standard in much of American journalism.

There are obvious benefits to having robots write earnings reports. For one, it facilitates a massive increase in the volume of content. The AP hopes to ramp up from providing 300 manual reports each quarter now to as many as 4,400 with the new system. An automated system also frees up reporters to work on more creative efforts, including analyzing the reports and writing stories based on them.