The Local Accelerator: How robots drive reach, depth & revenue
We had a question from a local news publisher recently: “We’d like to extend our reach by building hyper local sites along the perimeter of the region we currently cover. Could we somehow leverage automated content to do this?” The simple answer is yes. In fact, there are few more compelling use cases for newsroom automation than the Local Accelerator model. With robots providing a base of constantly updated texts about traffic, weather, local sports, house sales and so on, building out a presence in local communities is quick and efficient.
Sweden’s top news site Aftonbladet has a staggering reach nationally; 3.5 mi daily uniques in a country of 10 mi people. Knowing there is a limit to how much more they can grow in terms of reach, in 2019 an initiative was launched with focus on local communities around the country. “The strategy was to get closer to local Aftonbladet.se visitors, by offering local content relevant to them. The hypothesis was that as a result we’d also be able to capture more of the local advertising markets,” says Martin Ekelund, who heads up Aftonbladet’s local initiative.
Today, Aftonbladet has 230 local destinations (by municipality), and two cities, Malmö and Uppsala, also have local reporters. All the destinations publish robot written texts on traffic, weather and local sports. Uppsala also has a Homes widget that takes automated updates on local house sales. All the automated content means the local sites always feel fresh and updated. As an example: United Robots now deliver six weather updates a day to Aftonbladet; some 1,700 texts in total, pushed to local sites.
While weather updates are a great service to readers, the robot written local content also consists of more engaging articles. Local match reports include comments from team coaches — through United Robots’ Q&A function. At the final whistle, our robot sends a couple of match relevant questions to the coaches via SMS. The comments then get automatically inserted into the text. “Using text messages to automatically get quotes from coaches lifts the automated content to a new level and provides great added value for readers,” says Mattias Andersson, the Aftonbladet journalist who leads the automation work.
According to Martin Ekelund, the fact that the local destinations are regularly updated — feel up to date — means Aftonbladet now sell to local advertisers in general. In Malmö and Uppsala the local inventory is sold contextually, though the automated articles play a smaller part in this. In Uppsala’s Home widget, however, the stream of robot texts about home sales contribute to attracting estate agents and housing corporations to advertise in a very specific context.
From the point of view of the small local newsroom, the Local Accelerator model contributes to newsroom resources. The base of robot generated content means reporter time is freed up to produce the more engaging, deeper journalism.
Bärgslagsbladet/Arboga Tidning, part of Sweden’s largest local media group Bonnier News Local, use the Sports robot and the Real Estate robot from United Robots. During 2019, the robots delivered 1,074 sports texts and 826 real estate texts, all published automatically on the Bbl/AT website and in its app. Says Editor-in-chief Helena Tell: ”I estimate we’d need two additional reporters to do the work the robots do for us today. For a small newsroom, automation is necessary. We’re forever prioritising and sometimes I feel all we ever do is choose not to cover things. We know where to deploy our resources in order to make our readers happy. And if we can use technology and automation to perform tasks as well as we reporters would, there’s no doubt that’s what we should do.”
The key benefit of the Local Accelerator model is the volume, regularity and hyperlocal nature of the texts delivered. Within this model, there are a number of possible use cases, such as:
National goes local. The Aftonbladet case, where a national news brand wants to deepen its relationships with readers in local communities. From a business point of view, the objective may be to:
– generate local ad inventory / attract local advertisers
– drive relevance / engagement and thus digital subscription conversions and retention
– both
Extending existing beats. The Local Accelerator creates a low threshold for local publishers to extend their reach by building sites in additional communities, leveraging the base of automated content across topics like traffic, sports, weather and so on.
Quick foothold in new markets. The Local Accelerator allows publishers of any size to quickly establish a presence in new markets by providing great reader services like instant traffic updates and engaging local journalism through automated match reports or texts about new business registrations.
Robots cannot replace reporters when it comes to engaging with local communities. But within the Local Accelerator model they can provide a base of services and volumes of updated content that supports the growth of local engagement.
