According to the technology awareness platform Techslang, automated journalism refers to the production of news articles by machines or computer programs, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that allow applications to perform functions like scanning large quantities of data, selecting an article template or structure, and inserting key data points such as places, names, scores, and rankings. As a result of these automated tasks, a news article may be ready for publishing without human intervention, and much faster than a human could do it. The Tow Center for Digital Journalism, at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, has provided deep insight on this topic. The Guide to Automated Journalism, published by the Tow Center, states that the application of automated journalism ranges from simple code that extracts numbers from a database, which are then used to fill in the blanks in pre-written template stories, to more sophisticated approaches that analyse data to gain additional insight and create more compelling narratives.
Sport was one of the first areas where automated journalism was deployed. For example, in the U.S., Automated Insights and Narrative Science, both natural language generation technology providers, developed algorithms to automatically write articles about sporting events. Data visualization and data journalism are also areas where automated journalism has thrived. Reuters, the international news agency, uses robot journalism to create data graphics updated in real time. Reuters is also betting on the use of automated journalism to analyse data, and letting humans tell stories relying on this analysis. Due to the sheer quantity of data and diversity, fact-checking platforms are relying more and more on automated work. Fact-checkers like PolitiFact, Chequeando, Aos fatos, and others are using automated fact-checking to fight disinformation. We can also speak about geo-targeting news, news research, content production and chatbots that are already being deployed in some newsrooms, and all of them rely on automated processes.
