The Press Association becomes engaged
UK-based news startup Urbs Media for the responsibility of building a
suite of software that uses news data into savory content. Once up and
running, the team is expecting the software will be ready to fill in
some of the gaps that are currently existing under-serviced as the
universal economic strain being experienced by newsrooms throughout the
world deepens.
It’s related to a model The Associated
Press has operated for a while now there in the States, mostly
undertaking financial and cranny sports stories. A quick Google News
search of the telltale tagline “This story was produced by Automated Insights” shows hits from news outlets across the U.S.
In a news statement heralding the
business commitment, Press Association Editor-in-Chief Peter Clifton
announced the move a “genuine game-changer,” emphasizing that the
partnership will focus on novels that might not otherwise be written up
as local newspapers last to die off in this massive fourth-estate
extinction. Of course, he was also quick to add that the move won’t do
away with the human talent entirely.
“Skilled human journalists will still be
important in the process,” he emphasized, “but Radar allows us to fit
artificial intelligence to scale up to an amount of local stories that
would be impossible to provide manually.” People will stay involved in
the curation and editing of the stories and, probably, help limit the
possibility of accidentally issuing incorrect information in an era when
“fake news” is a fairly barbed insult on all sides of the political
spectrum.
