DataDesk – asked for by editors. At local news conferences in the U.S. over the past couple of years, editors have asked us a version of the same question: can you help us pull stories, and information, out of the public data we already have access to but can't keep up with?
At the recent Local Media Fest in Chicago, we were able to answer this question with an emphatic “Yes — we can help you!”
That's what we’ve built DataDesk for, a service we launched in Chicago. With DataDesk we provide you with daily digests of local information from the sources that matter to your newsroom — saving you the time to dig through YouTube, websites and PDFs plus organizing and flagging what we find for you. The data and the drafting are there when useful. Deciding what's a story, and doing the reporting that makes it one, stays with you.
We’re currently in a DataDesk project in collaboration with Shaw Media in Illinois (which also publishes automated real estate content from United Robots). The main benefit for the newsroom are the summaries generated by us from YouTube posts of recorded meetings in local councils, etc. One Shaw reporter who is using this service said it saves her 10 hours a week of going through YouTube recordings for one county alone. Another reporter, initially sceptical to the automated summaries, later said he appreciated having essentially been “given an assistant.”
BillTracker — never miss legislation that affects your community. Our new BillTracker service covers all bills going through State Capitol, including which bills local representatives sponsor and how they vote. The weekly newsroom updates include the status of all bills (ranked for local impact and news value) as well as three MyRep widgets aimed at websites/readers. One political editor we spoke to said that with as many as 1,200 bills passing through State Capitol every year, BillTracker would be a great tool to make sure the newsroom doesn't miss any important legislation.
Interested in learning more about our new Data Services? Please get in touch with cecilia.campbell@unitedrobots.se
