News automation: The publishers’ treasure trove

It's January and the annual Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions report from Reuters Institute lands on the news industry's virtual desks. Like previous years, the 2022 iteration – based on a survey of 246 media leaders across 52 countries – conveys a snapshot of an industry in constant change. From our point of view, this year marked a milestone. While AI in the newsroom has been discussed in the past few editions, the 2022 report for the first time mentions robot journalism specifically. This aligns with what we're seeing – over the past 12 months awareness of content automation as a newsroom tool has shot up. So let us provide a January 2022 snapshot of our corner of the business of journalism.

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.

During INMA's Product and Data for Media Summit I did a short presentation on how United Robots build automated content without any heavy lifting on the part of the publisher. I thought I'd take this opportunity to do a follow up around the process of getting automated content off the ground. "This is of course a brand new process for most of our clients, but it's what we do every day," says United Robots Head of Delivery Gunnar Södergren. "Our job is to make it as easy as possible."

Imagine publishing an article every time a house is sold in any of the neighborhoods you cover. Complete with images and satellite maps. With robots in the newsroom, generating this volume of content is not an issue. And suddenly, you can reach individual readers in local communities with stories relevant just to them. Here, we’ll look at how this logic is helping news publishers drive journalism and business effects today.

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.