Visit the website of Forbes.com and read the earnings forecasts for the New York Times Company, and you will notice the byline "By Narrative Science". Normally you have to open a copy of Wallpaper* to find someone with such a florid monicker. Except of course Narrative Science is not a person but a robot journalist – actually a set of algorithms which take data and turn it into words.

What started as an experimental lab at Northwestern University with journalists and technologists working together is now a fully-fledged business that turns data into stories of a type which will not be winning many Pulitzers, but which certainly pass the Turing test of making one unsure whether they were written by a person or machine. The lovable "stats monkey", which came from the same series of research experiments, does the same for sports stories, without the attendant vet bills, bananas and spelling errors associated with employing a real monkey.

Although this algorithmic approach to compiling stories is by no means new – the lab which spawned Narrative Science was conducting and publishing work a number of years ago – the ultimate ramifications of what the approach symbolises seem to be taking a long time to sink into most newsgathering organisations.

The irony of the rather poor first-quarter earnings of the New York Times being reported into the Forbes database by a series of algorithms should not be lost on anyone, not least the NYT itself. Along with other large newspaper brands in the US, such as the Washington Post and USA Today, there is growing unease at the paper about what one senior news executive vividly described as a "coming apocalypse" for the news industry in general and mid-sized news brands in particular.

One could be forgiven for thinking that the apocalypse has already dropped off its bags, if not actually arrived. Newspaper closures and bankruptcies have swept across the US in the past five years, and the advertising market in print has continued to decline faster than digital revenues are increasing (according to a recent Pew survey at a rate of one dollar up in digital for every seven dollars down in print).

What now seems to be clear to everyone who is engaged in the Apocalyptic Welcome Committee is that survival of the "what's next" takes a greatly increased magnitude of change from that which we have already seen .

At a recent meeting of senior news executives, one commented that he saw colleagues in other companies "coming into work every day and cutting a tenth of an inch off their own body, and really not doing very much about it". The statement itself was not that surprising, but the more widespread agreement in the room was. After 13 consecutive quarters of growth the US economy is technically if not visibly in recovery, and on a normal business cycle that puts us halfway through the "good times". What happens come the next recession?

Forbes, which clearly does not like the Times much, also recently pointed to a presentation by Ironfire Capital on why the NYT might not last beyond 2015. Mischievous investor-speak on one level, the presentation contained a couple of home truths about a plateau in cost-cutting and a failure to revive revenues which will resonate with many in the news industry. The message is that the disruption in the next round will have to outstrip anything seen to date. The New York Times is searching for a chief executive, quite possibly from the tech industry, and it is quite possible that many others will soon be in a similar state of remaking their businesses from top to bottom.