With 306 events over 28 different sports, there are a lot of medals to be won and a lot of sport to report on. Not only are there so many events taking place, but many are taking place at the same time.

Journalists at the Olympics, then, are clearly in a bind – to simply report what happened is a mammoth task, so providing insight takes a back seat. With millions following the action on social media as well as mobile and second screen digital platforms provided by broadcasters, journalists at newspapers and other news sites need to keep up.

So the Washington Post has created software – named Heliograf – to pull through the results of all the events automatically, freeing up their journalists to do more complex reporting from Rio.

Whether or not you feel comfortable with automated journalism, there’s no doubting that this kind of reporting has become incredibly time-sensitive. With social media and mobile technology, people now want news and reporting instantly, and when it comes to following something like the Olympics, that speed is crucial – people need results in real time.

It is a little bit scary to think that human journalists could be usurped by what are essentially bots pulling through news in real time. But it will free writers up to do just that: write. Instead of reporting on facts that can be reported by bots, the writers can instead focus on insightful content that adds to the public’s interest and knowledge.

There will always be a need to reporters, but when it comes to sporting events, it makes sense to automate some of the objective reporting of facts and leave the analysis to real writers.

The irony is that there needs to be some sort of painstaking human input. Football stats site Opta uses human labour to watch all the matches – over thousands of games in hundreds of leagues – and create statistics which can be brought through in real time by journalists, broadcasters and websites. We will always need someone to watch the game and report on the score, or at least to input the data into a system that will then pull it through automatically.

In a world of instant information, this could be the future of sports journalism – while the swan looks graceful on the lake, below the surface she’s paddling her legs to tread the water!