The impact of AI on business journalism

Ron Day, a former Bloomberg News journalist, writes for Big Think about the impact of artificial intelligence on business journalism.

Day writes, “At his desk a few years ago in the Bloomberg newsroom, Damon Kovelsky sensed the change coming: automation, artificial intelligence. Bots, crawlers, borg. Would it come for his job, he wondered? To stay relevant as well as employed, the married New York father made a choice.

“‘Automation was reaching a point where it could do what I was doing, and I tried to get more involved in the process’,’ said Kovelsky, 42, who wrote headlines, breaking news blasts, and combed Securities and Exchange Commission filings at the financial newswire. ‘There were some short-term projects. It didn’t pan out.’

“Earlier this year Kovelsky was let go from Bloomberg News. AI, he believes, had a part in ending his 12-year employment. He estimates that one-quarter of his tasks were taken by software that crawled filings and press releases for news and flashed headlines automatically. Another recently unemployed journalist, who requested anonymity to speak on the record, said that as much as 60% of her tasks had become automated over the past few years.

“Bloomberg is hardly alone in taking headline and story-writing functions from humans and turning them over to AI-powered systems. Rival wires Associated Press, Dow Jones and Reuters, papers including the Washington Post and New York Times and online providers like Yahoo and Quartz are relying more on computer-driven, automated journalism.”

Read more here.