Automated content frees up newsroom resources, fills in reporting gaps

By Cecilia Campbell

Chief Marketing Officer

United Robots

Malmö, Sweden

Connect

As United Robots is heading into our tenth year as a company, I thought I'd do a little stock taking. Our company, based in Malmö, Sweden, has grown significantly, particularly in the past few years, and particularly in the United States.

I think it's fair to say our learning curve has been as steep as that of our clients, which are now almost exclusively local media companies. Along the way we - and they - have learned what works and what doesn't (let's not dwell on the Lottery Bot we built for Newsweek!).

When we built the first text robot back in 2015 (a sports robot whose first texts covered local bandy matches in the north of Sweden) we had no clear idea of where we were heading. Looking back, we've had some key lightbulb moments, and so have the publishers we work with. For United Robots, an important milestone came in early 2022 when we realised our content is particularly useful for local news media; most of our clients now fall into this category.

So, what have we learned?

We've learned that editors are very much open to trying out automated content.

Providers like the National Weather Service help fill in content gaps with timely quality data that local newsrooms can not acquire on their own.

Some, like weather warnings, have a strong timing element to them: The content keeps the public updated on critical developments. Others, like real estate sales, are more about being able to publish a greater volume of stories relevant on a hyper-local level.

Whatever the automated content type, the product consists of ready-to-publish texts, usually accompanied by an image.

Automation is not enough in itself

The key insight from our publisher partners is that - as with any tech - there's no point using it simply because it's there. In other words, automation is not a value in itself; it's all about what it allows the newsroom to do.

For example, a key advantage of the automated weather warning articles is that they constitute around-the-clock coverage of critical events in the community, whether or not there are reporters in the newsroom.

Matt Dowling, director of breaking and local news at NJ Advance Media, which has published automated weather warnings since the autumn of 2023, explains the significance:

"We're unstaffed six hours on weekdays and about seven hours on weekends, and on weekends we don't always have a weather expert working. So, the automatically updated articles really help complement the times of days where we don't have the people with the expertise to handle the larger stories on weather reporting, in particular."

Fill in the gaps in your reporting

Another value is the fact that a text robot can generate large volumes of articles on a very granular level, like all real estate sales in every neighbourhood of the city a newsroom is covering.

The decision to start testing content automation in some of the McClatchy newsrooms in 2021 followed "brainstorming to look at our gaps," said Cynthia DuBose, senior vice president of product and experience, at the time. "What content and topics were audiences looking for that we didn't have?"

The team realised many of the topics driving new audiences were information topics like real estate, high school sports, and restaurant reviews - content the newsrooms did not have the staff and bandwidth to cover.

"We want our journalists to produce journalism, not track down information. They should focus on what they are skilled to do," DuBose said.

What about the money?

Some news publishers are focused purely on the traffic and pageviews generated by the automated articles. Some are testing putting the content behind a paywall, and it turns out critical information like constantly updated weather warnings can generate conversions.

There are also examples of publishers using hyper-local content (such as real estate sales) to launch newsletters - not directly generating revenue, but acting as a service to retain subscribers.

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About Cecilia Campbell

Cecilia Campbell is chief marketing officer at United Robots in Malmö, Sweden. She can be reached at [email protected] or @CianMian.

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