Comments on: Thomson Financial: Who needs human reporters?

Business news provider is breaking ground by turning to computers to write business stories. Thomson plans to expand PC's role as journalist.

[pencoyd]

Please find an example, so we can read it

This story almost made me think of The Onion.

Please find an example of the robo-written story and link to it, so
we can see for ourselves.

[fredmenace]

Probably just a template

They would probably read as just the basics from a standard script, like "On [Tuesday], [CompanyName] reported its earnings for the [quarter] ended [August 21, 2006]. Revenue [increased/decreased] to [http://$1.02 billion|http://$1.02 billion] from [$965 million] in the previous-year period, earnings [rose/fell] to [$153 million] compared to [$167 million] in the previous-year period, and earnings per share..." or whatever. The data can be grabbed from XML versions of the reports provided by EDGAROnline.

[jawandapuck]

Its a no brainer

This isn't new technology - I developed a cruder version of this autmoted article generation back in the 90's using Microsoft Access (read here: http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-Lc6oOeI7erEsTH0SCX1wXf89Lg--?p=37). Its likely taken this long to institute because news organizations had healthy profit margins back then. This type of "database" publishing will only get more sophisticated -- it could have easly been another example in Business Week's "Math Will Rock Your World" article from last year (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_04/b3968001.htm). It could also be considered an upstream extension of Google's automated editor or news aggregation system.

[Bart B. Van Bockstaele]

Indeed

I am also not particularly impressed. This are old programming techniques. I wrote something similar for a very different environment in the early 90's for DHL. It was not only producing a report from mere figures, it was reading other reports in order to produce the report.

[Bart B. Van Bockstaele]

Indeed

I am also not particularly impressed. These are old programming techniques. I wrote something similar for a very different environment in the early 90's for DHL. It was not only producing a report from mere figures, it was reading other reports in order to produce the report.

[technewsjunkie]

Do numbers tell the whole story?

No Caveats.

[flashtogo]

It's a reality.

What must be considered is that many journalists do write as
robots themselves so, for that, a computer is best skilled.

Whenever there is a need for a profile, or for "telling the whole
story", or for a more complex analysis you will need humans to
write. Now, for simply day-by-day mechanical reports of up's
and down's, where the text looks like extracted from a template
anyway, a computer can certainly do a better job.

What journalists can do to protect their jobs is to do exactly
what they are supposed to, telling a story, interpreting the data,
seeing between the lines and beyond the numbers.

Marcos Figueira
CEO, http://FlashToGo.com