"Robot Journalists" At Associated Press (AP)

AP's 'Robot Journalists' Are Writing about Minor League Baseball Now

Rich McCormick | July 4, 2016

The Associated Press has already used its automated reporting platform Wordsmith to generate things that its human writers also cover, like quarterly earnings and college sports, but now its "robot journalists" are branching out to a new sector — Minor League Baseball. The publisher will now cover the US minor leagues, feeding data from MLB Advanced Media into the the same software it has used to produce automatic stories for the last two years.
Human reporters were used by the AP to cover some Minor League games in 2006, but couldn't cover the full slate of teams and leagues.

In recent years, the use of algorithms to automatically generate news from structured data has shaken up the journalism industry—most especially since the Associated Press, one of the world’s largest and most well-established news organizations, has started to automate the production of its quarterly corporate earnings reports. Once developed, not only can algorithms create thousands of news stories for a particular topic, they also do it more quickly, cheaply, and potentially with fewer errors than any human journalist. Unsurprisingly, then, this development has fueled journalists’ fears that automated content production will eventually eliminate newsroom jobs, while at the same time scholars and practitioners see the technology’s potential to improve news quality. This guide summarizes recent research on the topic and thereby provides an overview of the current state of automated journalism, discusses key questions and potential implications of its adoption, and suggests avenues for future research. Some of the key points can be summarized as follows.

Source: Executive Summary, Guide to Automated Journalism, January 2016. http://towcenter.org/research/guide-to-automated-journalism/

"Ethics of robot journalism: How Automated Insights poses issues for data collection and writing." Source: https://ethics.journalism.wisc.edu/2015/10/20/ethics-of-robot-journalism-how-automatedinsights-poses-issues-for-data-collection-and-writing/

<more at http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/4/12092768/ap-robot-journalists-automated-insights-minor-league-baseball; related articles and links: http://towcenter.org/research/guide-to-automated-journalism/ (Guide to Automated Journalism. January 2016) and https://ethics.journalism.wisc.edu/2015/10/20/ethics-of-robot-journalism-how-automatedinsights-poses-issues-for-data-collection-and-writing/ (Ethics of robot journalism: How Automated Insights poses issues for data collection and writing. October 20, 2015)>