Covering the coronavirus story: automating to stay one step ahead
During the first week of March the coronavirus story shifted up a gear in Sweden. As people were returning from half term ski holidays in the Alps, the rate of new confirmed cases, and the amount of related information from national and regional health authorities, jumped. At the newsroom at Aftonbladet, Sweden’s top breaking news site, the work to keep up with developments intensified.
The task of manually staying on top of updates from around the country was time consuming and required reporter effort that would be better utilised elsewhere. There was an idea that perhaps all the incoming relevant information could be gathered in a single feed, ensuring speed as well as accuracy. In the morning of March 5, the Aftonbladet newsdesk asked long term partners United Robots’ development team for help. After lunch, the first iteration of Coronakollen (Corona Watch) was up and running, sending alerts to the newsroom.
First with new cases. Corona Watch looks for relevant new information based on criteria defined by the newsroom and then sends it to the desk. According to Aftonbladet Managing Editor Michael Poromaa this solved the problem of updating the 21 regional healthcare authority websites every second, which would have been required in order to be the first to report on new corona cases. “There was an immediate effect,” says Poromaa. “From having been, at best, second to publish new cases, we’re now more often the first, as happened with 60 new cases in Stockholm on March 10 for example. It’s extremely valuable for us that reporters get notifications through the robot alert channel in Slack.”
In its first week of use (March 5–12) Corona Watch generated 158 notifications which turned into numerous updates on Aftonbladet’s live Corona feed (and a number of subsequent articles). The number of sources increased from 4 to 21.
Newsdesk automation. There’s a lot of discussion in the industry about newsroom automation and it can apply to various different processes. Using robots to automatically generate articles from large data sets — United Robots’ core business — is one application, with a number of successful cases internationally, from the Washington Post to local media groups in Scandinavia. While deploying automated content requires a clear strategy and reasonably sophisticated execution to really provide journalistic and business results, automating newsdesk functions is quick and generates immediate effects.
As with content automation, newsdesk automation frees up reporter time. It also means the newsroom can lean on the newsdesk tech to support immediate publication around new developments. Nothing gets missed and updates are instantaneous. And as the story evolves, new sources can be added.
United Robots work daily with Aftonbladet and other large and small media groups, providing the news sites with automatically generated texts about e g sports, property sales and traffic. “In a way newsdesk automation is even more critical for small newsrooms, with limited resources,” says our CEO Sören Karlsson. “The fact that we develop in such close collaboration with the newsrooms means that we can quickly help when there’s a need for something like the Corona Watch.”
The last couple of weeks are proof that where fast evolving very big stories are involved, automating how the newsdesk finds its information can support both the quality and quantity of the journalism.
