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

...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. 

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 have now developed an automated solution to address this issue.

Swedish local media group NWT Media have started publishing robot journalism provided by United Robots, which means we now deliver automated content to all local media groups in the country. The NWT Media agreement includes automatically generated content in sports, real estate, traffic, weather, company registrations & bankruptcies as well as the editorial news alerts service Breaking Desk. The sports content service also includes Q&A, United Robots’ platform for automatic retrieval and publication of coaches’ comments.

The collaboration between Norwegian publisher Bergens Tidende (Schibsted) and United Robots around automated real estate content – a huge reader revenue success – has now generated nominations in 3 categories of the 2021 INMA Global Media Awards. Five percent of all article conversions at BT now happen through the real estate articles.

As many traditional newsrooms around the world are beginning to acknowledge the importance of internally reflecting the society they are covering, growing numbers of journalists choose to go independent. At this point in time however, the world of independent journalism is also lacking in diversity, the space being heavily male dominated. What holds women back from launching a successful career as a solo publisher? And why does diversity of voices matter in this dynamic, experimental space?  On March 18, we're sponsoring a free Media Trends Webinar hosted by Journalism.co.uk, which will explore this issue.

Automating sports content gives publishers a much broader scope for audience engagement than simply publishing match texts for top leagues. With automated sports content you can engage readers in different ways before, during and after match day. You can in effect publish content along a separate timeline for every league, every match, every reader – all generated automatically. This is where automation comes into its own – this type of timed targeting at scale would be unviable in a manual newsroom workflow.

A couple of months after it was announced we're one of Sweden's top 50 fastest growing tech companies (list published by Deloitte), we've made another prestigious and brand new list with our automated content services in sports, real estate, traffic and more. Breakit.se, Sweden's leading news site covering new business, has identified the country's 30 most promising,  yet unknown startups – missed, undervalued and ready to take over and United Robots is one of them. Breakit co-founder Olle Aronsson writes: "Some tech companies are constantly seen and heard – and bring in billions in venture capital. Others grow quickly but quietly."