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The truth is, these automated reports have allowed this digital media to expand its sports coverage by diversifying topics and extending them to other teams and categories, which otherwise would have been very difficult to accomplish through the use of human editors alone due to the fact that the priorities of information about football in everyday life are different (First Division, Champions League, and player signings).

In fact, to find out what impact this technology has had on the newsroom and to what extent it can be improved through the use of pre-programming and editing to increase the quality of information, the opinion of El Confidencial journalists was sought.

4.2. JFKL Interviews

AnaFut was launched and began writing reports in late 2017. The managers of El Confidencial Lab were responsible for explaining that this technology would deal with coverage of lower division football competitions that were not covered by journalists from the Sports section. The functions of the bot were clearly defined in relation to those of the professionals in order to facilitate their co-existence from the beginning.

This has been pointed out by Victor García, editor-in-chief of the Sports department1,, who refers to AnaFut’s endeavour as “throw-away work”, as these are match reports, which usually have a shelf life of a couple of hours on the Internet. Therefore, these are very short texts aimed at fulfilling user interest in knowing the latest news, as close as possible to the updates provided by live match coverage that many of them watch on television and social networks. “From there, people look for other aspects of interest related to the game, and that’s where our imagination and creativity come into play to tell other kinds of stories”, says García, who talks of the importance of this technology in satisfying the need for fast information. “Here, whether it’s a bot or a journalist, it’s worth telling what happened, and later do other stories giving more detail, a conclusion, or something that can provide added value”, he adds.

In the opinion of Alejandro Laso, director of El Confidencial2, Lab, “the important thing is for editors to start understanding this technology”, because this is really about the bot “doing other work so that journalists can be journalists, and are able to produce other stories that generate organic traffic” to the web. The objective of this Sports bot was clear from the beginning, which was “to save editors time when doing their job, to cover niches and areas that were not possible due to a lack of professionals, to reach new audiences, and to make Sports people more capable of acting and disseminating”. In addition, says Laso, “robots do the dirty work that journalists usually have to do, but it’s the type of work that doesn’t let them shine”.

Although the football matches of the Second Division B have been used as a pilot experience to test the bot, the question is whether this technology can be applied to other sports. In this regard, Alejandro Laso believes “it can be applied to anything that has structured data as well as frequent, routine competitions”. He uses tennis as an example, where the

1 Telephone interview conducted on June 4th, 2019.

2 Telephone interview conducted on June 7th, 2019.