Wednesday, April 19, 2017

"AP report details best practices and challenges of automating reporting on earnings reports and minor-league baseball coverage "

From NiemanLab, April 5:

Want to bring automation to your newsroom? A new AP report details best practices
 In 2014, the Associated Press began automating some of its coverage of corporate earnings reports. Instead of having humans cover the basic finance stories, the AP, working with the firm Automated Insights, was able to use algorithms to speed up the process and free up human reporters to pursue more complex stories.

The AP estimates that the automated stories have freed up 20 percent of the time its journalists spent on earnings reports as well as allowed it to cover additional companies that it didn’t have the capacity to report on before. The newswire has since started automating some of its minor league baseball coverage, and it told me last year that it has plans to expand its usage of algorithms in the newsroom.

“Through automation, AP is providing customers with 12 times the corporate earnings stories as before (to over 3,700), including for a lot of very small companies that never received much attention,” Lisa Gibbs, AP’s global business editor, said in a report the AP released Wednesday.

The AP’s report — written by AP strategy and development manager Francesco Marconi and AP research fellow Alex Siegman, along with help from multiple AI systems — details some of the wire’s efforts toward automating its reporting while also sharing best practices and explaining the technology that’s involved, including machine learning, natural language processing, and more....MORE, including link to the AP report
Previously:
"We Trained A Robot To Write Like Tom Friedman"
The Associated Press Is Leading the Charge to Deploy Robo-journalists
According to the AP, no journos were harmed in the making of this venture
Automating the Newsroom: The AP's Robot Copy Editor
"AP's 'robot journalists' are writing their own stories now"
Robo-journalists: Beyond the Quakebot
And Here Come the Robo-journalists "The CIA Invests in Narrative Science and Its Automated Writers"
Robot Lobbyists Say Robots Good, Create Jobs 
Sure, MoneyBeat Says Their Posts Are Not Written by Robots But How Can We Know?
Automation Steals Jobs: Röböts Playing Motörhead
Washington Post considered using robot sportswriters
A Deep Dive Into the Future of RoboAnalysts (will entry level hedgies still command $353K to start?)
A Job the Robots Won't Take: Become a Financial Charlatan
Robot Writing Moves from Journalism to Wall Street
"The automation of creativity: scary but inevitable" 
First they came for the journalists and I did not speak out-
Because I was not a journalist.

Then they came for the ad agency creatives and I did not speak out-
Because I was not an ad agency creative. (see below)

Then they came for the financial analysts and I
said 'hang on one effin minute'....