The robots in journalism's future

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 reporting on hundreds of weekly Dutch amateur football matches only became possible through robot reporting.

In a country of 17 million people, Boer explained that one million are members of a football club or league.

"We can report on a match we would never be able to send a journalist to," he said.

"Hyperlocal reporting is of great interest to a limited audience, but if you can report a lot of it, you can reach a lot of readers."

"No other media outlet will report on these events."

"The reporting is fast, almost real-time. If you have accurate, structured data, a good robot can turn that into an article that is readable for everybody. It depends on the data."

To ensure clarity of purpose, automated and human-generated content is kept separate in the news-gathering and newsroom process at MediaHuis Noord.

If the Dutch are football mad, Swedes have a serious passion for real estate prices.

According to NTM's Jens Pettersson, "Real estate prices have proven to be very popular content and the properties that command the highest prices draw the greatest interest."

NTM also develops robot journalism for sports, traffic news and business reporting, but uses algorithms on its websites to place stories that cross pricing thresholds more prominently on the front pages.

Robots also develop aggregated stories that assess pricing trends and develop ranked listings.

"Robots increase productivity on topics you choose on text that anyone could write," Pettersson said, "robots are fast, focused and have high work capacity."

"Let human reporters focus on stories that demand thought and consideration. We try to use humans for discovering and explaining new facts."

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there.