The bane of every sportswriter’s job is writing a game recap on deadline in which the lead changes in the final minute or on the last play — and add extra innings or overtime for double the fun. In Korea, there will now be one scribe not cursing the late story change, as the Yonhap News Agency has introduced a robot reporter to write automated game stories of English Premier League matches this season.
Yonhap, a major news wire service in South Korea, experimented with its Soccerbot last season; the machine spun out game stories for all 380 EPL matches in no more than two seconds. (Cue further cursing from the real live human journalists.) The pilot was deemed successful and has been implemented again for this season’s Korean-language articles with an eye toward honing the sophistication of the algorithm in advance of the country hosting the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang in February.
To be clear, the robot reporter isn’t crafting artful, descriptive ledes with any emotion or analysis but rather is spewing out the basic game facts based on information and statistics from up to five data sources. The advantage is the speed and rapid dissemination of game results, with a few added details such as noting the play of any Korean players, for instance.
The machine quickly churns through the same three steps any careful reporter would do — collect info, write, check spelling and grammar — but does so in a matter of seconds, culling sentence structure and format from a database of written work by Yonhap reporters.
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This practice has been growing in the U.S. as its leading wire service, the Associated Press, has partnered with Automated Insights for an increasing amount of financial reporting and college and minor league sports coverage in recent years. The sportswriting began in 2015 with college baseball games and later included lower divisions of football as well as Division I men’s and women’s basketball.
As the AP has explained, the technology — at least for now — isn’t intended to replace the jobs of any human reporter. Instead, the automated work is only covering events that otherwise would not receive any print or digital ink.
“These are not going to be stories that are going to be able to describe the pitcher’s facial expressions or the speeds of pitches or whether there was a bench-clearing brawl,” Barry Bedlan, the AP’s deputy director of sports products, said regarding the minor league coverage, adding: “What we’re doing here is trying to leverage the technology to expand our coverage that our customers have never had or haven’t had in a long time.”
Bedlan also explained that, in the case of financial reporters, the robots handled the tedious recaps of earnings calls, freeing the humans to spend more time tackling investigative reporting and more nuanced stories. Automated sports coverage has the capacity to be a similarly complementary technology, sparing reporters the difficulty of deadline game recaps so they can spend more time cultivating sources and analyzing the game action to share insights a computer can’t yet glean.
The United Kingdom’s Press Association recently received a roughly $800,000 grant from Google to fund automated coverage of local news stories in conjunction with data-driven start-up Urbs Media. The project is called Radar — Reporters And Data And Robots — will still rely on human journalists to identify stories and create templates for the robots to scour national public databases and generate content.
For now, however, the robot reporting in the sports realm will be limited to basic game recaps, though there’s no understating the deadline aggravation and stress that could spare the classically overworked reporter.