News automation: The publishers’ treasure trove

At United Robots, we see ourselves as a service provider within news automation. We design, build and support the whole chain of actions required to get it up and running continuously within an organisation.

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.

Every month we send hundreds of thousands of robot written articles to news publishers in Europe and North America. Almost all of them are published directly onto sites and apps without going through any editorial checks, so predictability is key when texts are generated. In order to ensure this reliable language quality we have developed our own flavour of Natural Language Generation, pragmatic NLG.

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.

In the 12 months October 2018–October 2019, the property bot generated 61,800 articles for Bostadspuls (automatically published). The CPM levels for this Home Sales premium advertising environment is around 20% higher than the average Mittmedia CPMs.

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.

With the real estate bot, the average number of articles (per local site) increased from 2/month to 480/week. The volume of articles as well as the volume of logged-in pageviews increased, thus driving engagement and retention.

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.