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

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.

...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. 

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.

This week, regional title Fædrelandsvennen, part of Polaris Media group, in Kristiansand in southern Norway, has unveiled its brand new Home Sales section, where they publish automated real estate articles about sales in a number of municipalities in Agder county. The publisher's launch included an explanatory article about the new Robot journalist working for them, who retrieves the data, calculates price per square meter, compares it to other homes in the area and writes the text. The articles include Google streetview images of the properties as well as maps and aerial photos with a street address label.

Swedish local media group Gota Media use automated real estate articles as part of their reader revenue strategy. With a conversion rate of 2%, the Real Estate Robot is currently the best converting byline across the group's ten news sites.