Artificial Intelligence,
Automation, and How They Are
Changing Business Journalism
Chris Roush is the Walter E. Hussman
Sr. distinguished professor at the
University of North Carolina–Chapel
Hill School of Media and Journalism.
He served as the School’s senior
associate dean from 2011 to 2015
and as the director of its master’s
program from 2007 to 2010. He is the
founder of the Carolina Business News
Initiative, which provides professional
training in business journalism, and he
created the School’s undergraduate
major in business journalism. He
is the author or coauthor of nine
books—five corporate histories and
four books about business journalism.
His textbook Show Me the Money:
Writing Business and Economics Stories
for Mass Communication is in its third
edition and is the leading textbook in
business journalism education. He also
has founded and run various websites,
including Talking Biz News, a website
about business journalism. In 2010,
he was named Journalism Teacher
of the Year by the Scripps Howard
Foundation and the Association for
Education in Journalism and Mass
Communication.
© Business Expert Press 978-1-94858-045-8 (2019)
www.businessexpertpress.com
Chris Roush
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Abstract: Technology has produced dramatic advances
in journalism, particularly in business journalism in the
past decade as artificial intelligence, automation, and
computers are now helping reporters and editors find
and produce stories. Most of the major business jour-
nalism outlets are now exploring how they can best use
technology to improve the quality of their reporting and
deliver it faster to consumers. This article explores the
efforts of four business news organizations—two big and
two small—that find and produce business news using
technology, and it examines what that means for the
­future of business journalism.
Keywords: artificial intelligence; automation; business
journalism; computers; journalism
Introduction
The use of technology in journalism dramatically
changed how content has been reported, written, and
disseminated to its various audiences. The invention
of the printing press led to the creation of newspapers,
the first form of mass media. The telegraph in the nine-
teenth century helped deliver in an instant news that
previously took weeks. More than 100 years ago, stories
were primarily written on typewriters and copyedited
using pencils. Then the stories to be published in that
paper were written and sent to a typesetter, who then
placed the text into metal type, letter by letter, creating
a page to be placed on a printing machine.
Now, stories are produced on laptops and desktop
computers, and editors use those same computers—as
well as software that can check grammatical and style
errors—to make changes to what a reporter has written.
The stories are then placed in software used to lay out
a newspaper page that is transmitted electronically to
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 Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and How They Are Changing Business Journalism
a faraway printing press or downloaded
­immediately onto a website for reading.
Reporters who previously needed to go
to courthouses, police stations, and govern-
ment agencies to obtain public records and
interview officials can now receive those
documents using the Internet and com-
municate by email, instant messaging, and
other methods with interview subjects.
These changes have been particularly
dramatic in business journalism. For exam-
ple, as recently as 30 years ago, business
reporters would send letters and checks to
a Washington, DC, service, which would
then find the Securities and Exchange
Commission (SEC) documents that the
journalist was seeking and mail them back
to the reporter. The process would often
take weeks, delaying the dissemination of
­important information to employees, inves-
tors, and others interested in the material.
Today, reporters can download those docu-
ments from the SEC website, or company
websites, immediately after companies file
them with the government agency. Busi-
ness journalists can also obtain similar re-
cords about companies and industries from
a number of other state and government
agencies by accessing online databases.
Business journalism has changed—and
improved—due to technology in other
ways. Reporters can use websites to quickly
determine who the largest investors are in a
public company. They can listen to a com-
pany’s earnings conference call and watch
on their computer the stock price react to
what its executives are telling analysts and
investors. They can find sources using so-
cial media such as LinkedIn and Twitter.
They can use Excel spreadsheets to ana-
lyze a company’s historical performance.
Using Skype and texting applications, they
can interview sources around the world—
economists, chief executive officers, invest-
ors, and others.
Overall, journalism today is replete with
examples of how technology is changing
the process of reporting and disseminat-
ing information and is contributing to the
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increasing speed at which news is being
delivered. David Skerrett (2018) notes that
technology has led to “a time of peak me-
dia” where consumers can no longer spend
enough time digesting all of the news and
information that is being provided. Stories
about minor league baseball games are
now written by software developed by a
Durham, North Carolina–based company,
Automated Insights, Inc., as soon as the
contest ends. Software applications can be
used to fact-check stories and other infor-
mation, as noted by Tama Wilner (2014).
Technology is dramatically affecting
other forms of mass communication as
well. For example, Jeff Beer (2018) writes
that advertising agency Wieden and Ken-
nedy used artificial intelligence and robot-
ics to help its client Nike develop a way to
sell custom-made shoes for its clients. “Po-
litical communication has been enhanced
by the ability to analyze huge data sets such
as 77 million tweets during the 2012 elec-
tion,” writes researchers Guo et al. (2016).
Public relations and marketing firms can
use analytical tools such as Google Analyt-
ics to determine which messages resonate
with consumers and which ones do not.
Technological advances are extremely
important to business journalism as report-
ers and editors increasingly face more com-
plicated issues and topics. Many business
news organizations are using some form
of technology to help them find and write
important stories in minutes or hours that
previously would have taken weeks to un-
cover—or that they would never be found
at all without the software. Technology has
helped in other ways. Randall Lane (2018),
the chief content officer of Forbes, wrote
about how the business magazine is using
an artificially intelligent publishing system
that helps its reporters and editors write
better headlines, choose better photo-
graphs, and find topics to focus on that
its readers are asking about. In the month
that this technology was rolled out inter-
nally at Forbes, its website posted a record
number of visitors. John Micklethwait, the
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 Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and How They Are Changing Business Journalism
editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, wrote
that a quarter of its content is now being
produced using some form of automation.
“News is changing shape—with technology
revolutionizing the way stories are pro-
duced,” wrote Micklethwait (2018). Bloom-
berg now has a real-time feed of Twitter
data that is being used by financial firms in
trading algorithms, and it is also using that
Twitter data to find news stories.
Michael Casey, a former Wall Street Jour-
nal columnist now at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, wrote about how
business journalism needs to use technol-
ogy more than before to decipher complex
business issues. Without this ability, addi-
tional financial crises such as the one that
gripped most of the world in 2007 and 2008
might occur again. Casey wrote:
In this era of “big data,” where high-tech
analytical techniques can produce
abundant, quantifiable information,
we should all have been empowered
to uncover the truth. But in reality,
for the average investor, journalist,
or even regulator, this new trove of
data has been mostly out of reach and
unintelligible. It should now be the
duty of journalists to unlock it. And
to do so, they need to harness the
same tools that financial institutions
and corporations use to sift, inter-
pret and make sense of mass digital
information. The value of ­human
sources providing information on
market players’ activities hasn’t gone
away—think of the lasting impact
of The Wall Street Journal’s “London
Whale” scoop on JPMorgan Chase’s
risky trading bets last year, a story that
led to news that the bank had racked
up $6 billion in losses and, later, $1
billion in regulatory fines. But those
stories must now be complemented
with c­ omputer-enhanced analysis
and interpretation. To get at the truth
will require crunching the numbers—­
billions of them. (Casey 2014)
© Business Expert Press 978-1-94858-045-8 (2019)
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The need for technological applications
in business journalism also comes at a
time when the primary subjects of busi-
ness news—companies, executives, and
economies—are also increasingly using ar-
tificial intelligence to improve their oper-
ations and develop new products. As an
example, Wall Street investment firms are
using technology to make trades for clients
immediately after important data such as
the unemployment rate or trade deficit are
released. Since the beginning of 2015, busi-
ness news organizations such as The Wall
Street Journal, The New York Times business
news desk, and tech-news sites Recode and
The Information have posted job openings
seeking reporters to cover artificial intelli-
gence and the future of technology. In May
2018, the Times began a series called “Fast
Forward” examining how emerging tech-
nologies are shaping the future of business.
This article examines how artificial intel-
ligence, automation, computer programs,
and other technology affects the world
of business journalism by looking at how
four media organizations—two large enti-
ties known worldwide and two that have
started in the past 5 years—use technologi-
cal inventions. These media companies
use this technology to provide business
news content in ways that help consum-
ers, investors, and other recipients better
understand what’s going on in economies
and businesses. The use of automation and
technology in business journalism is also
affecting other forms of mass communi-
cation. Dan Simon (2018) writes that the
increasing use of automation by business
news organizations in writing company
earnings stories is affecting financial pub-
lic relations. He noted,
The future of media relations will b­ egin
to see public relations firms and teams
extracting intellectual property from
their clients and helping them build
a repertoire of newsworthy material,
rather than just pushing out what is
handed to them. (Simon 2018)
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