Assuming your mission is to be an invaluable source of journalism – and information – to your local community, what is your strategy to achieve this? Where do you focus your resources and how do you prioritise?
Picture this. It's 9pm on a Tuesday, and a three-hour city council meeting just wrapped up. The county released a batch of building permits that morning. The local court published its weekly rulings at noon. The health department updated its restaurant inspection list. Nobody in the local newsroom read any of it. Not because it wasn't newsworthy — because there just wasn’t time.
That's the daily reality for many local newsrooms: small teams, endless local data, no realistic way to watch all of it. And even the stuff that reporters prioritize to look into is often difficult and time consuming to access.
But it’s valuable information to newsrooms – and readers:
Newsrooms: There are potentially important stories hiding in the local data – stories which, if you had the time and resources to surface them, would be unique to your newsroom. They would allow you to be proactive in your journalism and set the local news agenda.
Locals: There is everyday information locals look for and often can't easily find: city hall decisions, school updates, road closures, building permits, event calendars, restaurant inspections. That's the kind of useful, service-level information the local paper used to carry.
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:
>Identify more local stories underpinning investigative journalism
> Spend more time talking to sources and people affected by those stories
> Provide more and broader, relevant information to locals
All of the above means you give readers more reasons to come back to your site. They find even more important and unique journalism that touches their community and themselves as individuals. They can also find all the local information they search for day by day.
DataDesk – asked for by local editors
At local news conferences in the US over the past couple of years, editors have asked us a version of the same question: can you help us pull stories, and information, out of the public data we already have access to but can't keep up with?
That's what we’re building DataDesk for. It 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 real-time alerts or digests – rated by how newsworthy it looks, with a first draft ready if you want one. The data and the drafting are there when useful. Deciding what's a story, and doing the reporting that makes it one, stays with you.
We’re now working with a couple of local US newsrooms to refine the functionality of DataDesk. Once it’s launched after summer, each newsroom will be able to ask it to cover their particular data sources of interest.
Imagine: What if you knew the moment a noteworthy building permit landed – before it became a rumor at the coffee shop? What if a pattern in local court filings surfaced itself, instead of a reporter stumbling on it by chance months later? What if, during a hurricane, your newsroom could tell readers which roads were closed the moment the data changed – without anyone manually refreshing five government websites?
These are the types of newsroom problems we’re building DataDesk to solve.
To find out more, contact Cecilia Campbell, cecilia.campbell@unitedrobots.se