Executive Summary

In recent years, the use of algorithms to automatically generate news from structured data has shaken up the journalism industry—most especially since the Associated Press, one of the world’s largest and most well-established news organizations, has started to automate the production of its quarterly corporate earnings reports. Once developed, not only can algorithms create thousands of news stories for a particular topic, they also do it more quickly, cheaply, and potentially with fewer errors than any human journalist. Unsurprisingly, then, this development has fueled journalists’ fears that automated content production will eventually eliminate newsroom jobs, while at the same time scholars and practitioners see the technology’s potential to improve news quality. This guide summarizes recent research on the topic and thereby provides an overview of the current state of automated journalism, discusses key questions and potential implications of its adoption, and suggests avenues for future research. Some of the key points can be summarized as follows.