One of Britain’s leading news agencies has won a £6,22,000 Google grant to run a news service with robot-aided reporters churning out thousands of localised stories monthly, said to be a “game changer” for media outlets.
Press Association (PA), which supplies news to outlets in the UK and Ireland, has teamed up with data-driven news start-up Urbs Media for the robot journalism project which will use five reporters to produce 30,000 stories a month for local media.
PA and Urbs Media will set up Reporters and Data and Robots (Radar) to produce thousands of stories each month. The grant won by PA comes from the search engine giant’s Digital News Initiative, aimed at supporting innovation in European digital journalism.
The five human reporters will use open government and local authority databases and story templates to automate stories about health, crime, employment and other subjects. The scheme is likely to begin early next year, as PA celebrates its 150th anniversary. PA and Urbs Media are making a workflow plan to generate the large volume of stories for clients.
