Frankfurt am Main – 2019-03-12
Newsrooms are increasingly warming up to the possibilities of automating news content, but a number of challenges still surround the actual implementation and deployment of this growing development, according to a just-published WAN-IFRA report.
The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) partnered with the University of Helsinki and the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland to produce this latest report called News automation: The rewards, risks and realities of ‘machine journalism.
News media companies face ever-growing commercial pressure to extract higher margins from dwindling resources and that is a key driver for news automation, powered by machine learning and AI. The report focuses on a specific part of news automation: the automated generation of news texts based on structured data.
The report features five examples of how news automation has been implemented in newsrooms around the world: MittMedia and United Robots (Sweden), RADAR (UK), The Washington Post (US), Valtteri (Finland), and Xinhua and Caixin (China).
While these cases and others around the world demonstrate some of the possibilities for publishers to exploit news automation, researchers have found that there is still much development to be done – also from the publishers side, i.e. to continue to experiment.
“Five years ago, there were many bold predictions about how automated journalism will develop,” says Andreas Graefe, Endowed Sky Research Professor at Macromedia University, in the report. “From claims that 90% of news will be automated to Pulitzer prizes for automated content. In reality, not much has changed. Progress is steady but slow.”
Here are a few takeaways from the report, which can be downloaded [1] by WAN-IFRA members.
For more information on WAN-IFRA research and reports, visit: www.wan-ifra.org/reports [2].
Links:
[1] http://www.wan-ifra.org/news_automation_report
[2] http://www.wan-ifra.org/reports