Introducing DataDesk – surfacing hidden stories
Are there data sources your newsroom frequently needs to access but find it difficult or time consuming to use?
With DataDesk, we give you a shortcut to public data and the stories that allow you to drive the local news agenda.
What is United Robots new DataDesk? In a nutshell:
> A service needed by local editors
Many local newsrooms are now using AI to work more efficiently. But what if AI was instead used to create value – to free up journalists time rather than to cut costs? There is a lot of discussion in the industry about where AI’s real value in journalism sits. Our answer is simple: we don't think the biggest win is writing faster, we think it's reading more. That’s why we’re building DataDesk – a newsroom service that does the local data digging for you so that your newsroom can:
1. Identify more local stories underpinning investigative journalism
2. Spend more time in the community, talking to sources and people affected by those stories
3. Provide more and broader relevant information to locals
> What it does
DataDesk turns hard-to-access local data sources into a stream of editor-ready story leads. It ingests, structures, and summarizes hard-to-access local data — court records, restaurant inspections, DOT traffic, public-health alerts, civic notices, transit data — and surfaces it as a continuous flow of story leads delivered into the newsroom's workflow. Editors choose which leads to develop; United Robots does the legwork of finding, parsing, and packaging the signal.
> Who it's for
Small-to-medium local newsrooms that want to cover civic and community data but don't have the time, headcount, or engineering capacity to chase down dozens of fragmented sources.
> As a DataDesk user you will:
– Select the data sources that matter to your community and are important for your newsroom to cover
– Get daily or weekly digests of new data source activity
– Get real time alerts when something happens
– Get article drafts, automatically or by request
– Be able to set filters based on newsworthiness
– Deploy tags to organise leads (data items)
The use case. DataDesk watches the local public data sources that matter to your newsroom, filters for what's actually worth a journalist's attention, and delivers it as tagged real-time alerts or digests – with a first draft ready if you want one. Read more here.
DataDesk – you select the sources and set the filters. We do the rest.
Sign up to receive updates about our DataDesk product
To set up a meeting, contact Cecilia Campbell, cecilia.campbell@unitedrobots.se