Automated reporting and business journalism

By Alex Barinka

Business journalists may be racing against heartless competition as automated data-driven stories become more commonplace.

Robbie Allen, founder of Automated Insights, has developed computer programs to convert sports data into stories that mirror sports news articles including game previews, post-game stories and player-of-the-week stories.

The numbers-based data typical to sports news is similar to that in business news, specifically economic reports and companies’ financial information. Though that may not be the only content that could be automated by business news organizations.

Allen said that Automated Insights is working with either Bloomberg News or Reuters — he wouldn’t specify — in automating data news coverage that is not necessarily in finance.

“We can automate six to seven paragraphs relatively easily,” Allen said at a Society of American Business Editors and Writers‘ conference in Indianapolis.

The sports content that the company is currently producing can be altered to reflect a pseudo-voice of a writer ranging from styles that are “over-the-top like Dick Vitale” to straightforward game stories.

“The brand of content we produce is very quantitative in nature,” he said. “I think computers are perfect for that.”

Allen said that errors will occur in the stories if the data set is not correct, which could make automated business reporting more challenging than sports.

“It’s much harder in the finance space because of that element of manipulation,” he said.

If the numbers given by the company are misleading—whether through deferred expenses, one-time earnings gains or other similar items—then the automated article may not tell the complete story.

To combat that, Allen said that the data points used should be consistent across all companies.

While automated story writing may begin to permeate into business reporting, Allen doesn’t see it as a direct threat to journalists’ jobs.

“We’re not replacing anything,” he said. “We’re just adding to the conversation.”

Barinka is a UNC-Chapel Hill business journalism student attending the SABEW conference.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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View Comments

Pat Warnock says:
March 17, 2012 at 3:58 pm
I have seen this idea around since I started in research in 1977, it has always fallen short of promises.
Computers are not creative, they are made to carry out instructions. It requires creativity to report and write news stories.
When a software program writes a joke 1,000,000 people laugh at, I will believe computers are creative. Until then, let's let people report and write sports stories.