Every local and regional newsroom in the UK can now make use of the Press Association’s “robot-generated” stories—powered by Arria NLG Studio.
As reported recently by The Press Gazette, The Drum, and others:
An open trial has now begun, in which the more than 1,000 regional titles in the UK can sign up to Radar’s new website to receive localized data-driven stories.
Four new data reporters have recently joined the Reporters And Data And Robots (Radar) automated news service, set up by PA and Urbs Media, which sees stories jointly produced by journalists and artificial intelligence.
PA has said it wants Radar to produce tens of thousands of localized stories from data sets every month once it is fully launched.
The new website went live with around 4,000 localized versions of a dozen stories sourced by its reporters, spanning stalking offenses, vacant homes, pupil absences from schools, and opioid prescriptions.
Paul Gallagher, digital innovations editor at Reach, added: “We have been running a trial of the Radar service at a small number of our local titles since Christmas and have now extended this to all Reach regional newsrooms.
“It is very interesting to see how the content has developed and also to see how journalists respond to the idea of using copy generated by AI, or ‘robot’.
“Developing data journalism has been a key part of our strategy at Reach and we are trialling the Radar service to see if it will provide a new way of finding stories that are important to our audiences.”
Arria clients, Urbs Media and The Press Association, received a grant from Google totaling $830,000 to help fund this service using Arria NLG to transform journalism across Europe’s news industry. The funds were one of the largest grants allocated so far by Google through its Innovation Fund.
READ THE FULL STORY > Press Gazette | The Drum
