AI in journalism is here to stay. Scandinavian media especially has come a long way – most have already introduced some form of AI. The report Nordic Survey Study of AI in Journalism, published by Medier & Demokrati, charts Scandinavian news media's use of the technology. Here’s what we can learn from their experiences and challenges.
Robot journalism as a concept has been around for some years now. The idea can inspire doubt and even dread in editors and journalists. Will the robots replace reporters, who controls them and how, can they be trusted – the questions are many. At United Robots, we and our publisher partners have worked with the reality of news automation since 2015. We see how the robot written content actually supports journalism and we think it’s time to address some of the popular myths that surround it.
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.
Crises always drive automation: that’s not a threat, it’s an opportunity. Automation supports the journalistic mission and publishers who don’t at least consider using robot texts for basic reporting are missing out.
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.
During 2019, Mittmedia generated 7,3 million page views with the help of robot generated articles. This equalled 3 percent of the company’s total number of page views during that year.