John Micklethwait: The Future of News - Bloomberg

From a wide-ranging journalism reality check

"Nowadays, journalists increasingly prep their story templates to be filled in by a computer system called Cyborg that dissects a company’s earnings the moment they appear and produces not just instant headlines but, in a matter of seconds, what is in effect a mini-wrap with all the numbers and a lot of context. All this is in competition not just with Reuters but with specialist news-scraping sites that serve hedge funds looking for microseconds of advantage. An arms race has developed, with the battleground moving to secondary data—like the number of iPhones sold in China—that can often move a share price more than the profit numbers. Today, a quarter of the content produced by Bloomberg has some degree of automation.

It’s not just the financial press. The Washington Post, for example, uses automation to cover high school sports. News organizations that used to first hear about news from local reporters now use banks of computers to find news, trawling through reams of social data for words like “explosion,” “resignation,” or even “Kardashian.”"

John Micklethwait: The Future of News - Bloomberg