While content automation is becoming increasingly commonplace in the news industry, most local publishers United Robots work with are doing it for the first time. Taking the step of letting robots produce some of the content published by the newsroom is a big one for many – for editorial reasons (note United Robots tech is built on rule based AI, not generative AI), but also, significantly, out of a concern for what technical implications it might carry with it. The very first question we had from one of our US publisher partners was indeed; "Before we decide to start, we need to understand how much heavy lifting is involved".United Robots have been integrating automated content feeds into publisher CMSs for almost ten years now. We know our way around most of them, and we’re fully integrated with some. "Publishing automated content is of course a brand new process for many of our clients, but it's what we do every day," says United Robots Technical Manager and AI Supervisor Gionata Zarantonello. "Our job is to make it as easy as possible."
We’ve just announced a partnership with Atex, enabling easy activation of automated content feeds directly within Atex’s digital publishing products — including MyType, their latest SaaS CMS for newsrooms, also available as a WordPress plugin. “News publishers use our service in order to provide readers with unique hyperlocal stories relevant to them, stories based on quality local data,” says United Robots CEO Andreas Melvanius. “Thanks to automation, this is content that adds value to local journalism without impacting newsroom resources. The integration with Atex’s MyType will make it even easier for publishers to access and publish this unique local content.”
We are also fully integrated with WordPress, including Newspack – all our team needs to do for new a publisher partner is to create a User for them and plug in the automated content feed into their CMS. We’ve gone one step further with Norwegian Labrador, where our content feed can now simply be switched on within the CMS, a simple function many of our Norwegian customers benefit from. In addition to the above we have worked extensively integrating our content with most major content management systems on the market, notably Arc, Cue, Blox and Netro.
There are a number of ways the content can be delivered. By far the most common one is for the publisher to receive JSON files to a specific end point (URL) in the CMS which then triggers an automatic workflow to convert the file into an article and automatically publish it. Some publishers require other formats, e g XML. Alternatively we can set up a simple RSS feed that is always up-to-date with the most recent content. The goal from United Robots’ point of view is that it should be possible to send the content straight to readers on sites and apps, though some publishers do the publish step manually.
However the automated content is delivered, receiving and publishing it does not have to involve a lot of heavy lifting for publishers.
Interested in learning more? Contact us today: cecilia.campbell@unitedrobots.ai