BitDepth# 1356
Mark Lyndersay
ROBOT journalism, the automated production of reporting, is still very much a niche for larger media houses and agencies, but as with all technology, what's dauntingly expensive today is an affordable subscription service tomorrow.
Tomorrow will be here sooner than we think, and today, we can take note of the work being produced for routine reporting by, among others, the Associated Press and The Washington Post.
At a webinar in March, the International News Media Association (INMA) hosted a discussion about article automation technology that featured Cecilia Campbell of Sweden's United Robots, Jens Pettersson, NTM Chief digital reader revenue office of the Swedish media conglomerate NTM and Ard Boer, Product Owner, Digital, MediaHuis Noord of The Netherlands.
Both European media houses are clients of United Robots, which provides a range of data-driven automation services, including automation of sports reporting, real estate articles based on sales data, reporting drawn from business records and annual reports, summaries of traffic conditions and weather updates.
United Robots' technology uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing technologies (NLP) to transform structured data inputs into stories that are not just semantically correct, but also tailored to the tone and writing style of the publisher.
The company delivers this service in seven European languages as well as in US and UK English, though not all services are available in all languages.
The Columbia Journalism Review has an excellent Tow Center report on automated journalism here:
https://bit.ly/3PLpX4k.
United Robots isn't the only tool used by newsrooms.
The Washington Post developed Heliograf, which delivered 300 articles from the 2017 Rio Olympics and is used to provide wide coverage of high-school football games to satisfy hyper-local Washington readers.
Forbes developed Bertie to deliver story ideas and thought starters to its contributors and newsroom.
AP began using its Automated Insights NLP tool Wordsmith to deliver more than 5,000 NCAA Division one basketball recaps in 2018. It has since delivered more than 50,000 stories for the service, primarily routine business reporting and sport recaps.
United Robots delivers its automated journalism services to 750 websites, according to Cecilia Campbell.
"Journalists do journalism," Campbell said, "our tools provide information."
The selling points of the service are straightforward.
Volume doesn't matter to robots which can "write" stories in seconds. They don't make mistakes. If it's in the data it is in the story. Analytical tools can also discover discrepancies and unusual patterns in blocks of data much faster and with greater reliability than a human can.
"The focus should be on supplementing the work that humans do through automation rather than thinking of the tools as a replacement, it's not an automation or human choice. The biggest challenge is to find good data to work from."
For Ard Boer, delivering r
