I found this interesting quote from wikipedia when i was doing research for my next project.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_trading

Financial market news is now being formatted by firms such as Thomson Reuters, Dow Jones, and Bloomberg, to be read and traded on via algorithms.
“Computers are now being used to generate news stories about company earnings results or economic statistics as they are released. And this almost instantaneous information forms a direct feed into other computers which trade on the news.”
The algorithms do not simply trade on simple news stories but also interpret more difficult to understand news. Some firms are also attempting to automatically assign sentiment (deciding if the news is good or bad) to news stories so that automated trading can work directly on the news story.