News automation: The publishers’ treasure trove

For the publishers we work with, there is one aspect of automated content that really stands out. One key value they leverage – namely the volume of texts the robots can produce. Time and again we see it. Media companies discovering the real benefit of news automation when they start using it to provide coverage where there previously was none. For sports e g, it means you can set up a publishing timeline (see image) for every league, every match, every reader – all generated automatically.

Update: The Q&A function won a third place in the Best New Technology or Digital Product category of the 2020 Global Media Awards.

Talking to a BBC journalist the other day, I was laying out the drivers behind newsroom automation at Swedish local media groups. We agreed it sounds somewhat contradictory that robots now play an active role in creating journalism that involves hundreds – thousands – of people that were rarely seen in local news stories before. I was talking specifically about our Sports robot’s Q&A function, which – we’re very happy to say – has been nominated in INMA’s 2020 Global Media Awards.

Klackspark uses United Robot’s sports robot for the blanket coverage of all matches down through division 6. For the 2019 season (Apr-Oct) the sports robot generated a total of 1.2 mi page views, 450,000 of which were logged-in.

Oct 2018–Oct 2019 Mittmedia's automated real estate articles generated 7.4 mi logged-in pageviews (17.6 mi pageviews in total) and some 900 subscription sales.

Automation in the newsroom – many publishers talk about it, relatively few have any actual experience. Where do you start? How do you generate any real benefits? It may sound like a technical issue, but the tech is actually the most straight-forward part. This blog lays out some of the top success factors for newsrooms deploying automated content and explains how it’s all about improving journalism and growing business. 

We recently received a question from two German researchers: Do journalists profit from the automated journalism or do they find themselves homeless a few years later? We reflected that this focus on the potential threat of automated content to reporters’ jobs and the quality of journalism is all but gone in Sweden. And that this may have something to do with the fact that here, almost all local media houses now use the technology every single day.

2018 has certainly been the year automated content – robot journalism – has had a real break-through in Swedish newsrooms. The majority of Swedish local media groups, as well as national giant Aftonbladet, daily publish automated editorial texts in collaboration with Swedish United Robots.