This paper examines how different types of information processing costs that investors face influence the manager’s voluntary disclosure decisions. Using a parsimonious model of voluntary disclosure, we predict that the costs associated with investors learning about the existence of disclosure (“awareness cost”) act as a disclosure friction and decreases voluntary disclosure in equilibrium. However, the costs associated with investors extracting and understanding the disclosed information (“acquisition cost”) increases voluntary disclosure in equilibrium. The latter is because when acquisition cost is high, investors pay attention primarily to the fact that voluntary disclosure was made but not as much to the actual content of the disclosure, inducing disclosure from firms with moderately bad news. We test these predictions in an empirical setting where investors experienced a decrease in awareness cost and, in some cases, also a decrease in acquisition cost as a result of Associated Press (AP) writing automated articles about firms’ earnings news. The staggered implementation of the automated article coverage was largely exogenous to the firms’ earnings news and voluntary disclosure choices, and helped disseminate the earnings news more broadly. We find that AP’s automated article coverage has a positive effect on bundled guidance, but there is an additional countervailing negative effect for those firms where acquisition cost decreased in addition to the awareness cost.