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

While content automation is becoming increasingly commonplace in the news industry, most local publishers United Robots work with are doing it for the first time. Taking the step of letting robots produce some of the content published by the newsroom is a big one for many – for editorial reasons (note United Robots tech is built on rule based AI, not generative AI), but also, significantly, out of a concern for what technical implications it might carry with it. The very first question we had from one of our US publisher partners was indeed; "Before we decide to start, we need to understand how much heavy lifting is involved".

What does automated local content look like on a news site? In order to help publishers picture what our content products could do for their local sites, we've created a Showcase site, populated entirely with our in-house generated content. From live traffic updates in Los Angeles, to Warnings of extreme weather across Texas, Hurricane watches off Florida to the most expensive houses sold in Manchester or Miami – it's all here, continuously updated. 

Most of the small local news publishers our team at United Robots talk to in the US battle one common problem. Their newsrooms do not have the resources to produce all the unique local content their readers expect. The two topics that most often come up as underreported are high school sports and real estate. Here, we're going to focus on the latter, and explain how content automation can help under-resourced local newsrooms get a thriving real estate section off the ground.

United Robots is now live with six different automated content products across some 65 newsrooms in the US – with Weather Warnings and Real Estate sales the most popular ones, and Wildfire updates the most recent. Insights from our work with our US publisher partners include that it's important to decide why and how you're automating content production, and that there are different ways for that content to generate value for your newsroom and readers.

We're thrilled to announce that we'll be hosting a workshop during INMA's upcoming Media Subscriptions Summit in New York City, headlining our US publisher partner Advance Local. United Robots has worked with the group since mid 2022, and from the start it was apparent that this publisher has a very robust methodology for testing and rolling out new features and content across the group. VP Content Strategy Lamar Graham and Matt Dowling, Director of Breaking and Local News, NJ Advance Media will take to the stage in NYC to share insights in how the publisher has experimented with and is rolling out automated real estate and weather warnings content across its ten local titles.

Dutch soccer site Voetbal International, part of sports publishing group PXR, has added robot written match reports to their match center on the site – where they publish live results and standings. This automated articles are in addition to the regular match reports on the site, which are still produced by the journalists.

We are very excited to announce that we've been named as one of the "Ones to watch" in the 2023 edition of the prestigious Tech Trend Report from the Future Today Institute, and its famous quantitative futurist founder Amy Webb. We're included in the News & Information vertical, along with key players in our field. The new edition of this seminal Report was announced by Amy on stage at SXSW. 

We're very excited to announce that media veteran Jonas Eriksson has joined United Robots as Chairman of the Board. Jonas has a background in e g Bonnier and was the CEO and chief editor of Swedish news agency TT for eight years. He was also the president of Minds, an industry association for news agencies globally, including AP, AFP and Kyodo in Japan. As of 2019, Jonas works as chairman of the board of a number of Swedish companies including MAG Interactive and Pepins. He joins us at a time of international expansion, which, in parallel with the explosion in AI, means news publishers are increasingly waking up to the value of automated content.

“United Robots has proved that it is possible to generate editorial quality automated content, which means routine reporting can be done by robots. Leveraging this tech, publishers can focus even more on quality journalism – thanks to freed up reporter time as well as monetisation opportunities gained through the expanded automated coverage. United Robots has created a market for their pioneering tech and products, and I very much look forward to being part of this journey going forward,” says Jonas Eriksson. 

In partnership with US local media group McClatchy, we have developed a Hurricane bot, which creates automated updates on data from the National Hurricane Center in the US. The bot was put to the test as hurricane Ian made land fall at the end of September (the image is from its land fall over the Carolinas).

We’re proud to note that United Robots publisher partners feature heavily in a big, new international report on automated journalism from INMA (International News Media Association). While we’ve not been directly involved in the production of the report, it relies on several cases from our publisher partners and draws on insights provided by us and our clients during workshops and webinars over the past ten months. And its two main takeaways are that 1, automation is good for the bottom line, and 2, it frees up time for (but does not replace) journalists.