“It has been a huge huge hit in McHenry County e g, because there are so many government meetings – and we simply don’t have enough reporters to cover them all. We wanted a way to fill that gap. We're also able to provide much more relevant timely coverage to our readers because we're getting the DataDesk report and we can just go from there. That's been a huge huge timesaver.”
John Sahly, Managing Editor
Shaw Media is the first local news publisher to use the new DataDesk service from United Robots. DataDesk is a tool which covers the local sources that matters to each newsroom and serves up ranked summaries of the data it surfaces. The sources we cover for Shaw Media include meetings videos posted to YouTube across the 14 counties the newsrooms cover (such as city councils, county boards and school boards/districts) as well as appellate court rulings, health news and public notices etc.
YouTube videos – saving hours. The DataDesk summary emails from YouTube meetings include a headline and a number of items to give a quick and efficient overview:
- • At a Glance list of decisions/discussions ranked from high to low importance + linked video time stamps
- • Key points with more information + linked video time stamps
- • Disputes detected and described with linked video time stamps
- • Source video link
- • Groups of tags:
- – general topics
- – Shaw Media’s specific regional beats (e g Data centers, Public safety)
- – any budget cuts covered
- – any disputes detected
Maximise the time reporters have. Shaw Media’s primary objective behind using DataDesk was to be able to cover more local meetings, and for that coverage to be more time efficient. They started out testing it in their most populated areas McHenry, Kane and DeKalb counties. Says Managing Editor John Sahly: “It has been a huge huge hit in McHenry County e g, because there are so many government meetings – and we simply don’t have enough reporters to cover them all. We wanted a way to fill that gap.”
“We had a reporter out last week, so I sent the DataDesk emails through to the one who was working in the newsroom. She came back saying that the summaries had saved her ten hours of work that week alone,” says Sahly. “The same week I had an editor come back saying they’d noticed a story in a summary email, a story the newsroom had missed, and they were able to immediately assign it to a reporter.”
Shortened lead times. Another advantage of the DataDesk summaries is that stories get written sooner. If a reporter has an entire meeting video to look through from a Monday evening, that might not get done until Wednesday and the story then not get published until Friday. “We're able to provide much more relevant timely coverage to our readers because we're getting the DataDesk report and we can just go from there. That's been a huge huge timesaver.”
As well as saving journalists’ time, DataDesk has spotlighted stuff that’s gotten missed. “One editor told me a reporter had come back from a meeting saying not much had been going on – but when the DataDesk summary came in it was clear there had in fact been an important development. Not least for editors who are new to an area, DataDesk is a good checking point.”
Confirming editorial gut feeling. John Sahly has had feedback from his team that the DataDesk reports support choices made in the newsroom. “I had one reporter telling me she had two concurrent meetings to cover and had to pick which one to actually attend. The DataDesk summary of the one she didn’t go to confirmed that nothing newsworthy had really taken place there. Another reporter chose to focus on something else rather than go to a meeting. She told me: ‘The DataDesk email confirmed my feeling that I didn't need to go to that meeting."
Mixed feedback from reporters. John Sahly initially sent the DataDesk summaries to editors, but at first didn’t get much feedback – so he started sending them through to the reporters on the beat instead. The response was varied. “Beat reporters whose topic has been covered, or who have been to a meeting covered have sometimes been sceptical, including saying the robot didn’t understand the topic because its ranking was wrong etc. My response to them has been: ‘That's not the point. This isn't competitive – we're not looking to replace you.’”
“Other reporters have immediately seen how much time it’s saving them. We've generally won people over by focusing on how they've got a really great notetaker who can cover a meeting they miss and provide detailed notes with timestamps to the relevant video. That's been the biggest aha moment for the reporters that were bristling at this and bristling at any idea of AI.”
Covering more. John Sahly says DataDesk has enabled the newsrooms to cover more meetings, generating more stories than they did before. “A concrete example – we’ve never really had time to attend the McHenry County Health Board meetings. Thanks to DataDesk, we’ve gotten two or three stories in the last month from their meetings. Another example was when we had a reporter out on vacation, and the staff left in the newsroom had too many county meetings to cover – with the DataDesk reports they produced two or three school board stories that would normally not have gotten done in this situation.”
United Robots currently covers 30+ county YouTube channels for Shaw Media, as well as tracking updates to a handful of county and court websites. “The service and the collaboration with United Robots has been tremendous – to be able to send off a list of YouTube channels and get them all covered like this is incredible. The United Robots team has also been very quick to respond to tweaks we’ve requested,” says John Sahly.