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

United Robots is now live with six different automated content products across some 30 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.

We're happy to announce that in the US market we're now working with PropMix – a collaboration that enables media companies to deliver hyper local real estate articles containing sales and market insights. The partnership means we're able to provide highly relevant and timely real estate news stories for local media companies to attract readers – based on top quality data from a renowned provider.

Another Latin American publisher is now live with our automated content. Regional news site Diario Huarpe in Argentina is publishing automated football reports from national and international leagues as well as weather reports for 100 cities in the country and internationally. The latter are updates three times a day.

We're happy to announce that we have signed an agreement with Norwegian data visualization platform everviz. Our market leading news automation platform and everviz’s powerful data visualisation tools will be combined into a cutting edge automated editorial product with great relevance to local readers.