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Regional publishers trial new PA robot reporting project

Ralph BlackburnRegional press groups are piloting a robot reporting project being developed by the Press Association.

The automated news service involves a team of reporters using open government and local authority databases, and story templates, to generate automatic stories about health, crime, employment and other subjects.

PA has now hired the first journalists to work on the scheme, and 20 local newspaper titles have published stories produced by them since a closed pilot was launched at the end of November.

Each title published localised versions of four stories culled from official figures covering the following issues:

  • Trends in birth registrations across the UK based on figures from the Office of National Statistics
  • Cancelled operations across England extracted from NHS data,
  • A breakdown on social mobility and life chances for disadvantaged children based on data from the government’s Social Mobility Commission
  • Department of Transport data on average A Road delays.

In all there are 35 regional titles involved in the pilot from 14 publishing groups including Archant, Independent News and Media, Iliffe Media, Johnston Press, Newsquest, Midland News Association and Trinity Mirror.

The project, called RADAR (Reporters and Data and Robots), was launched in the summer after PA was awarded a £700,000 grant by Google as part of its £150m Digital News Initiative.

So far two of the five journalists who will work on the project have been recruited – former Ilford Recorder, Romford Recorder and Wanstead & Woodford Recorder chief reporter Ralph Blackburn, pictured, and former Guardian journalist Niamh McIntyre.

They will work with data journalism start-up Urbs Media, launched by former Local World executive Alan Renwick, which has been involved in developing the project.

Pete Clifton, editor-in-chief at PA, said: “I’m pleased to see our customers actively engaging with the content. Their feedback is providing us with valuable insights as we scale up production to reach our target of 30,000 stories each month for a much broader user base.”

Tim Williams, managing editor at Archant, also welcomed the new content.

He said: “RADAR is an exciting new service and a very welcome positive boost for Archant’s newsrooms, giving us access to data sets and information that are enabling us to share important stories with our readers.”

9 comments

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  • December 12, 2017 at 2:40 pm
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    pages templated, stories templated, generic content across areas and publishers, stories top and tailed ,and a photo of a photo of a photo being used to illustrate the piece, has the industry really come to this?
    If this doesn’t present the greatest opportunity for small independent local publishers to take what little of the market remains then I don’t know what does. We surely can’t be far off the time when newsrooms no longer exist and the only staff needed will be the ones to turn the machines on.
    Good wishes to the many new local news providers thriving by giving local people the news they really want while the bigger publishers convince themselves that playing games and relying on robotic news systems will prop up their ailing papers and bring the readers back .

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  • December 12, 2017 at 4:56 pm
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    Hi Archie. Avoiding generic content, and helping smaller news providers, are actually two of the main goals we’re aiming for. This is a wire service to give titles localised content, which they can either publish as is or (preferably) work up with local angles, comment etc. We’re only a few days into the pilot but already many of the titles testing the service are doing the latter, and producing some great content they wouldn’t otherwise have for their readers.

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  • December 12, 2017 at 8:01 pm
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    I’m sure “ Archant, Independent News and Media, Iliffe Media, Johnston Press, Newsquest, Midland News Association and Trinity Mirror’ will be delighted to be referred to as ‘ smaller news providers’
    The truly smaller new local independent news providers are doing a very good job as it is providing exactly the kind of hyper local news people care about and who are supporting their endeavours by buying copies,supporting the free papers and advertising within them.

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  • December 13, 2017 at 6:24 am
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    30,000 news stories a month? or ‘churn ‘ as it’s otherwise known.
    Quantity over quality is one of the main reasons so few people buy a local paper these days yet a ‘managing editor’ welcomes more of the same over locally sourced, on the ground,news about the people,places and issues of importance to local communities, the real issues which matter to local people and which should be a basic staple of any regional news providers offering, however this requires a level of journalism no longer practiced by the bigger publishers so the boxes will continue to be filled with sourced content of the kind mentioned in the piece above ,all £700,000 worth of it.

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  • December 13, 2017 at 8:30 am
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    The sub-head on the homepage puff says it all:

    Twenty local title spublish stories produced by scheme

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  • December 13, 2017 at 9:17 am
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    Hi Archie. There are several independent publishers in the initial pilot group, plus a few hyperlocals. We’re opening it out to more over the next few weeks to meet demand.
    Hi Norridge. There are over 1,000 local titles in the UK & Ireland, plus hundreds of hyperlocals, broadcasters etc, so 30k local stories/month (ie 1k/day) isn’t really such a big number.

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  • December 13, 2017 at 10:03 am
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    The stories covered – cancelled operations, social mobility, etc – are just the sort of stories that are no longer being investigated because they are too labour intensive. So this scheme has many merits – especially if the papers follow up the stories with case studies and challenge the local authorities/organisations to explain themselves.

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  • December 13, 2017 at 11:35 am
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    So it’s really one data-based story lead a day (roughly) to each paper?

    That actually sounds pretty useful, though if it takes off (in terms of the papers using the stories) it might make this reporting project unexpectedly rather powerful in setting the news agenda.

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  • December 13, 2017 at 12:41 pm
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    Exactly my point, Barnaby. Mining data bases – what we used to call researching – isn’t a new idea but one which has many opportunities to expose corporate failures and open debate on key social issues.

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