Writing for Machines, Not People

It is a truism that, over the last 20 years, news writing, reporting and even user-generated content have had to adapt to machine readers and crawlers that index online content and algorithms that rank display results. That now seems to be spreading to the writing of financial reports as well. 

“Corporate disclosure has been reshaped by machine processors, employed by algorithmic traders, robot investment advisors, and quantitative analysts,” say Sean Cao, Wei Jiang, Baozhong Yang & Alan L. Zhang in a paper written for the National Bureau of Economic Research. 

“Our findings indicate that increasing machine and AI readership, proxied by machine downloads, motivates firms to prepare filings that are more friendly to machine parsing and processing,” they say. Of course. 

To be sure, beyond writing for the algorithms, many more informal styles also have emerged.  But structural changes are important in view of the use of search engine translators, for example. Use of idioms arguably is discouraged in headlines, for example, as those might not translate easily and accurately into other languages. 

Headline writers often prefer to use puns, or word play. That might not work as well for crawlers indexing the content. So factual “indexable” headlines--if less clever, perhaps--are more important. 

So is the importance of “clickable” writing and storytelling: creating content that gets attention. Sensationalism still works, perhaps sadly. 

But the larger point is that writers increasingly write to be noticed by algorithms. Yes, people still write to be read by people, but to get an audience also means writing for the machines that index content. 

Reporters, meanwhile, either have chosen--or are forced to--step outside the bounds of traditional objective journalism, which creates many new problems for readers, viewers and listeners.