242 | nº 29, pp. 235-254 | doxa.comunicación
July-December of 2019
Automated sports journalism. The AnaFut case study, the bot developed by El Confidencial...
ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978
4. Results
The analysis of El Confidencial’s automated football reports used a sample of eighty published texts related to all matches of the National Championship of the Second Division B League played on the 9th and 10th of February and the 2nd and 3rd of March, 2019.
This sample is considered adequate given the fact that it uses texts produced in the same way from the same source, which is a bot in this case. Furthermore, a selection of texts has been gathered on the El Confidencial website that were published throughout the same season involving the same protagonists, and were spread out over time for nearly a month in order to see if there had been an evolution or improvement in the technology used.
The Third Division in Spanish football consists of four groups of twenty teams each, and in the analysed reports, all of the clubs appear referenced on two occasions. In this way, when all of the teams are present, it is possible to obtain a better in-depth view of the texts and to observe if there is any type of difference or variation in the writings depending on the clubs and protagonists covered in the reports.
The first report written by AnaFut was published in El Confidencial on November 14, 2017, and as highlighted in Image 1, its debut was announced in the Sports section of this media on Twitter. In this tweet, the reader was made aware that a robot would bring all of the Second Division B and Third Division sports reports to the web
Image 1
Screenshot of the tweet from El Confidential Sports. 14-11-2017.