Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

On average, when an AP sportswriter covers a game, she produces eight different versions of the same story. Aside from writing the main print story, they have to write story summaries, separate ledes for both teams, convert the story to broadcast format, and more.

“It’s a manual labor nightmare,” Jim Kennedy, the AP’s senior vice president for strategy and enterprise development, told me in his New York office. Collectively, AP journalists spend about 800 hours a week converting print stories to broadcast format.

As a result, the AP is experimenting with machine learning in an attempt to automate some of those processes. The news agency wants to free up capacity for journalists while also increasing its output as it looks to provide new types of coverage to its clients to try and grow its business.

By 2020, the AP, Kennedy said, would like to automate 80 percent of its content production, though he admits that specific goal is “more aspirational than real.”...

The rise of artificial intelligence and automation in journalism has been front and center in the news lately, from Narrative Science co-founder Kris Hammond’s prediction that “a machine will win a Pulitzer one day” to Facebook’s decision to automate its Trending Topics feed.

Algorithms seem certain to play a growing role in the production and curation of news, but it remains unclear what exactly this trend will mean for journalism — or for the human journalists who currently produce it.

Celebrants argue that algorithms will simply take over journalism’s most menial tasks, freeing up human journalists to tackle more advanced work. Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait, for example, called automation “crucial to the future of journalism,” and New York Magazine writer John Micklethwait described the introduction of automated reporting as “the best thing to happen to journalists in a long time.”

However, skeptics fear that robots may end up replacing journalists instead of helping them. In a column last month, veteran newsman Robert Rector predicted a future in which newspaper executives simply “build robots to replace reporters” and lick their chops as “they envision a business with little or no overhead.” Hammond of Narrative Science did little to quell such fears when he estimated that 90 percent of news content could be written by computers by the mid-2020s....