More and more local newsrooms in the U.S. are looking to automated content to solve a couple of key problems. The first one is that, with limited newsroom resources, there’s simply not enough unique local content to meet readers’ demand. The second one is that it’s resource intensive to cover critical developments in weather and traffic 24/7, for example. At United Robots, we produce automated articles from quality, structured data, to fill these gaps in local reporting.
Next month, we’re heading to the Mega-Conference to talk to local publishers about how we might be able to help them. This year, our COO Antonia Mariassy, native to Miami, will travel home to Florida from our Malmö, Sweden, HQ to showcase products and explain best practices in this relatively new field in local news publishing.
In the U.S., we currently have six different automated content products live at some 30 local news titles. The products fall into two categories, according to the problem they solve:
1. More unique (hyper)local content. The content pieces consist of ready-to-publish texts, accompanied by an image or graphic. Products: Real estate sales (residential + commercial) and Local sports.
2. Instant coverage of critical events. The content pieces consist of ready-to-publish texts, accompanied by a map, graphic or image, and delivered within minutes of new data coming in. Products: Weather alerts, Traffic, Hurricanes, Wildfires.
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,” SVP Product & Experience Cynthia DuBose said at the time. “What content and topics were audiences looking for that we didn’t have?” The team realized that 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 manpower to cover. “We want our journalists to produce journalism, not track down information. They should focus on what they are skilled to do.”
What about the money? Some of the local news publishers we work with 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 that critical information like constantly updated weather warnings can generate conversions. There are also examples of publishers using the hyperlocal content on real estate sales, for example, to create a new or bigger real estate section as well as newsletters, enabling them to create sponsorship packages for realtors, home improvements companies or home styling providers.
We hope you get a chance to stop by the United Robots table at the Mega-Conference and have a chat with Antonia. Click to get in touch with her to set up a meeting or just drop a line!
