On average, when an AP sportswriter covers a game, she produces eight different versions of the same story. Aside from writing the main print story, they have to write story summaries, separate ledes for both teams, convert the story to broadcast format, and more.
“It’s a manual labor nightmare,” Jim Kennedy, the AP’s senior vice president for strategy and enterprise development, told me in his New York office. Collectively, AP journalists spend about 800 hours a week converting print stories to broadcast format.
As a result, the AP is experimenting with machine learning in an attempt to automate some of those processes…
