Automation is journalists' companion, not competitor: Studies

Despite fear of losing jobs to machine, a new report by the International News Media Association (INMA) shows that automation has allowed journalists to have more time to create more valuable products, which in turn will drive revenue for their respective media companies.

Automation, the report states, paves way for newsrooms to produce more stories that are popular with readers, but sometimes are too "labour-intensive for a human reporter to create".

"They also can gather data for journalists working on investigative pieces and save hours of time tracking down statistics," states the INMA report, which was published last month.

A Digital Journalism journal article published last month corroborates INMA's report findings. It underlines the many benefits of championing AI-driven data journalism, from using bots to do simple interviews to personalising content based on location and preferences to ensuring that certain values are reflected in news stories.

"This is all to cover the bases, of course, while freeing up talent to do the real thing: in-depth journalism put forward by humans that holds power to account and that audiences enjoy and profit from," the article states.

Heavyweights in the news industry have been experimenting with and using automated technologies in recent years. Bloomberg, for instance, is using a system called Cyborg to analyse companies' financial reports and produce news stories that include key facts and figures.