Once upon a time, real people sat at the desks of wire services like Reuters and Bloomberg, and decided which press releases merited being sent out over the wire. Today this process is increasingly being given over to computers, which use keywords to analyze public companies’ information that has been publicly released. They then shoot them out quickly to the financial world. So it should come as no surprise that the readers on the other end of the Reuters and Bloomberg wires are also, alas, increasingly computers.

As noted in a recent article in Financial Times, computers are now being specially programmed to trade stocks automatically based on the latest news stories about company earnings or statistics. These stories come from the wire services in computer language, and the receiving computers make trades based on the news within milliseconds – based on analysis of “years" worth of news stories to see how certain headlines affected market movements.

The FT story quoted Matthew Burkley, senior vice president of strategy at Thomson Financial: “One of the big consumers of news now is a computer….This area has turned out to be broader than we thought. Instead of being limited to a marginal number of our clients, the demand for news which is readable by a computer is very widely spread.”

Similarly, Kirsti Suutari, global business manager of algorithmic trading at Reuters said, “There is real interest in moving the process of interpreting news from the humans to the machines.”

But a certain degree of caution was also expressed. “News events are extremely subjective,” Will Sterling, head of institutional electronic trading at UBS, told FT.

Human news readers are safe for now, but for how much longer?