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Lecompte, 2015; Dörr, 2016; Graefe et. al, 2016; Fanta, 2017; Hansen, Roca-Sales, Keegan y King, 2017; Lindén, 2017; Marconi y Siegman, 2017; Usher, 2017; Renó y Renó 2017; Salazar, 2018; Wölkeer y Powell, 2018). This quantitative and qualitative increase in research has helped place the focus on automated content generation in the journalistic field as an essential phenomenon in terms of information production and consumption by audiences.

Graefe (2016a) and Dörr (2016) were among the first to develop a list of media that were already using automated methods for content production. On the other hand, it was Fanta (2017) who focused on news agencies in order to identify which of them produced content using algorithms and tools designed to produce information in an automated way.

Other researchers focused on the behaviour of the media when confronted with content automation (Lindén, 2017), as well as on the benefits of customizing local information through the application of data automation tools (Lecompte, 2015), the audience’s perception of the informative content produced by applying Artificial Intelligence methods (Graefe, 2016b), and on the response of different audience segments (divided by age group) to texts produced by humans and robots (Slater and Rouner, 2002).

The question of the journalistic profession and how it relates to the phenomenon of automation has also been addressed (Túñez López, Toural Bran and Cacheiro Requeijo; 2018). For their part, Thurman, Dörr and Kunert (2017) have conducted interviews with journalists from the BBC, CNN, Thomson Reuters and others with the aim of finding out their opinion on some journalistic articles produced using automation techniques. Meanwhile, one of the first to address the issue of the relationship between journalists and automation was Van Dalen (2012), who analysed how several journalists reacted to the launch of StatSheet, a network of information websites specialising in sports topics written entirely by machines. Within this new context, the journalistic profession would reach, for some authors, a state in which the collaborative aspect would become much more important due to the liberation of journalists from certain assignments thanks to the application of automation methods and the use of work synergies (Clerwall, 2014).

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now an indisputable reality in newsrooms. Within the growing application of this technology in journalistic production, the technological development and application of bots and algorithms to the automatic writing of informative texts stand out.

2. Automated sports journalism

Apart from the world of finance, the so-called “robot journalism”, or “automated journalism”, has found the area of sports coverage to be a more suitable field for its development. This has been the case ever since major news agencies began producing teletypes from generated data and algorithms to broaden their coverage of different competitions. Some of these agencies have included AP and AFP in 2014, and Reuters in 2015.

Thus, news agencies paved the way for the rest of the important media organizations, which soon began to apply automated tasks to their coverage in order to reach more sites and audiences, and to respond to breaking news as dynamically as possible”.