Writing a routine earnings story · Ceded (since 2014)

The Associated Press begins producing quarterly corporate earnings stories with Automated Insights software in July 2014, going from about 300 companies covered each quarter to about 4,400.

What was ceded is turning a filing into a short standard story, the kind that follows a fixed shape and adds nothing a table does not already contain. Sports results followed. The volume rose more than tenfold and no reporters were laid off for it at AP, because the extra 4,100 companies were ones nobody had been writing about. What is not ceded is everything outside the table: why the figures look like that, who is not telling the truth, which question to ask next, and the decision that a story matters at all. The automated pieces carry a line saying a machine wrote them, which is itself an admission that the byline means something.