By tradition, reporters work through those reports each quarter to extract financial data for business news articles. There are two fundamental limitations of this approach. First, there are currently more than 4,000 publicly traded companies in the U.S. and almost 40,000 around the world. With its existing resources, even an organization as big as the Associated Press (AP) could only produce about 300 such stories in a timely fashion per quarter – and that left thousands of potential company earnings stories unwritten. Second, even though these stories are relatively easy to write, they involve a lot of repetitive work copying and pasting numbers – something even trained reporters find difficult to do with perfect accuracy.