How automating earnings stories helped the AP biz news desk

Lisa Gibbs, former AP business editor and now director of news partnerships, will speak at a VentureBeat webinar next week about how working with Automated Insights to have software write corporate earnings stories has helped the business news desk.

A VentureBeat story states, “With structured data about earnings releases and report templates, they launched their first major automation project.

“‘We went from our human journalists on the business news desk writing about 300 earnings stories a quarter to automating about 3,700 stories a quarter,’ says Lisa Gibbs, director of news partnerships for the Associated Press.

“In this case, there’s no artificial intelligence or machine learning, Gibbs explains. It’s simply about using tools to be able to generate a volume of stories far more efficiently than humans could do it.

“‘We considered that project enormously successful because we understood the power of freeing our journalists from what we would call routine, low-value news tasks,’ Gibbs says. ‘We freed them up to work on more high-impact journalism.’

“Instead of the entire department of business news reporters having to drop whatever interesting story they were working on four times a year to pump up the volume, now they’re able to zero in on the corporate stories that were truly interesting, and dramatically increase the amount of investigative work and the amount of coverage in other areas.”

Read more here.