Robot journalism adds value to a newsroom in 5 ways

The phrase “robot journalism” starts off problematic with many newsrooms, yet many media companies say it is worth the risk.To get more news about GRS, you can visit glprobotics.com official website.

During an INMA members-only Webinar on Wednesday, United Robot’s Chief Marketing Officer Cecilia Campbell said that while robot journalism is “an increasingly popular way to expand the capacity of the newsroom,” she acknowledges the term itself is somewhat problematic.

First, the word “robot” can be confusing for reporters. “It’s not robot vs. human,” Campbell said. “It’s not an either/or choice.” With very few specific exceptions, United Robot’s media partners have not used their technology to replace reporters — in fact, a few have even hired more journalists after deploying the robots — but rather, they’re “using automated content as part of an investment in better local journalism.”Second, the word “journalism” can be misleading. “To put it simply,” Campbell said, “journalists do the journalism. The content produced by our robots, it’s not really journalism — it’s information.”

One of the big concerns publishers express about robot journalism is how the newsroom will react. Campbell emphasised it’s important to stress that it’s not an either/or proposition, but rather that they complement one another really well.

Jens Pettersson, chief digital reader revenue officer at NTM in Sweden, said they’ve been using robots since 2019. About two years ago, they started an initiative to increase subscription numbers and have been using robots to help achieve that goal. The robot is fast, has the capacity to produce a large amount of content, and it’s focused solely on what we want it to cover.

NTM has been using the robots to cover the topics of real estate sales, sports results from lower divisions, traffic news, and newly started companies. They’re looking to expand that list to include weather and business reports in the near future.

Pettersson discussed how they maximise the effects of the robots by mixing human reporting with robot reporting.

“We have an algorithm that runs our front pages,” Pettersson said, “based on news value [as determined by] the editors, plus things like subscriber page views and number of comments.” Because the real estate sales content is extremely popular (the more a home sells for, the more interest there is from subscribers), they can “set a threshold value so that the higher home prices will appear automatically on the page.”

In addition, though every single home sale is published individually, they can use the information to create aggregated pieces on topics like the most expensive homes sold during a particular period of time. And these pieces are “smash hits for engagement,” Pettersson said, often “among the most read articles of the day.”The robots are only reporting on facts, on numbers. But then journalists can take a deeper look at the data, Pettersson said, digging into, for instance, why houses in a certain area are selling for higher prices.

In terms of numbers, Pettersson said NTM’s most-read reporter had an impressive 4.9 million pageviews from subscribers last year — while the robot had 9.4 million pageviews in the same year.