What we’re talking about: the latest about news automation

News publisher El Espectador in Colombia will be using robots to write domestic and international football match reports. The company has signed an agreement with United Robots for automated match articles for a number of major domestic and international football leagues. The agreement covers pre and post match texts. All texts will be enriched with images, team logos, and affiliate URL linking to El Espectador. The texts will be automatically enriched with metadata to optimize distribution.

We're now starting our Central American journey. Antorcha Deportiva, one of Guatemala's leading sports sites, will use automated articles from United Robots to cover 4,000 football matches a year, a challenge that no local media has managed thus far. 

Robot journalism supports a growing number of local newsrooms. One of the best in class is Bergens Tidende in Norway, who was awarded three 2021 INMA Global Media Awards silver places for its Home Sales website section, entirely populated with robot generated content. Over the past year it has generated more than 1 mi pageviews, and is now driving 5% of all BT’s article conversions of paying subscribers. 

We're thrilled to announce that US local media group McClatchy have signed an agreement with us for a pilot partnership to deliver automated news about home sales in Sacramento County, CA. The pilot, which is live as of early September, includes automatically generated stories about individual sales as well as aggregated articles on aspects such as median or average price, and top lists of most expensive homes sold during given periods for given areas or neighborhoods.

September 2021 – Today, a majority of Scandinavian newsrooms leverage robots for routine reporting. We've now pulled together a star panel of publishers who are committed to automated journalism and eager to discuss why.

United Robots have established ourselves as the go-to provider of solutions for robot journalism. €1,5 mi in capital from Investment AB Spiltan will now allow us to significantly accelerate expansion across international markets, as demand for automated journalism gathers pace.

...with no impact to newsroom time or resources.

Live sports is one of the most powerful tools when it comes to driving reader engagement as well as subscription and advertising businesses. However, managing video content publication is often a resource-intensive workflow for news publishers, making it hard and expensive to create substantial video consumption volumes. 

We're now working with Bonnier News Local and their video provider Flowplay, to solve this issue. We have set up an automated workflow whereby we provide every single live stream or video clip with its own robot text before and after the match. The video/article page includes graphics, widgets, images and links for all of BNLO's 40 titles.

The beauty of robots as reporters is that they can sift through and analyse huge amounts of data and then churn out digestible pieces of content, quickly, efficiently and consistently.
Our newest robot tackles the cumbersome task of turning companies' annual reports into short, readable articles and visuals.

OK, that's a slight simplification. But the fact is that Bergens Tidende's new Home Sales vertical – entirely populated with robot written articles – has been nominated in the category Best Subscription or Membership Product in the 2021 Digiday Media Awards Europe.