Journalism generated by machine is on the rise

An actual implementation of such would be wonky?[1] Yes. But decent is a relative word. People are quite willing to put up with a lotta issue to get what they want. (The churn of quick-shift material in the self-publishing world is enough to demonstrate this.)

But, in relation to the nature of text vs video as I mentioned in another comment, the integrity of the written word probably doesn't matter. If video dominates, the words needed in a script need be no more than a generalized layout of plot-points filled with a bit of ad lib and improvisation. (Given the nature of so much 'reality tv' you don't even need that, simply impress the images and arrange them to the pre-defined consumer-expected structure.)

We really overestimate the importance of the novel. Tweets could be generated easily (and are), and such snippets, I'll argue, are to most-consumed scriptorial content. And visual media predominates. The novels that have wide-ranging effects are things like Dan Brown, which are structured in just such the way as they are much easier than would be suspected to be systematized (As most people will admit: he's really good at writing the same book over and over again).

And the people who care about 'remotely decent novels' beyond their own engagement are few and far between. They have no mainstream cultural value (in the US) beyond shock value.

[This is not to be taken as me knocking novels. Also, I may be too US-centric, but I doubt the rest of humanity is any less dominated by the arresting nature of the visual, or, again, they interact heavily through messaging apps that count in the snippet category.]

>regurgitating an existing novel

That's what most media is. (Which is not to be taken as a slam; a given culture has to repeat or it's not a culture.)

[1] Am I going to absolutely bet on that it would work? No. But I've done some work in this area, and I still will contend the distance between theory and praxis is much smaller than anyone wants to admit. The tooling would be much simpler than a full-blown AI.

Yet, the elephant in the room is the fact that more and more attention span is held by just a handful of platforms. If economic trends are any indication, the coming 'winter' will be rough for many firms that are competing for fewer dollars that aren't on Facebook or Google.

Interesting times ahead...

As 'structured data' goes, it's nowhere near where it needs to be to support 'instant article generation' beyond anything but the shallowest headline numbers. The consolidated financial statements all have appendices (notes) with relevant details. The case study you linked to simply indicates only that reduced man-hours significantly by automating the process of manually picking numbers and putting them into an article template. They may as well be putting out a press release.

Although the topic of the post is how automation affects financial journalism, it bears mentioning that an analysts' job is to reverse engineer the report to see how they arrived at those numbers. The vendors' auto-generated reports never include formulas, so you'll have to be doing your own calculations as part of your due diligence.

For instance, if they're trading at a high P/E ratio, how much of that is due to positive investor sentiment and not related to recent buybacks? The headline numbers won't reveal that, but past data and the notes to the financial statements usually will.

If their cash balance says $x billion, how much of that came from convertible bond issues that are coming due in the next 12 months?

[1]http://ir.tesla.com/sec-filings?field_nir_sec_form_group_tar...