Aamulehti
A large part of a journalist’s work goes into investigating background materials. Lingsoft provided Aamulehti with a solution: a robot journalist that can screen interesting topics from background materials and in this way speed up the work of journalists.
Aamulehti is Finland’s second most read newspaper, both online and as a print. Aamulehti focuses on news in Tampere and Pirkanmaa. Most of the work done by journalists happens before the actual writing process when they look for interesting news topics and familiarise themselves with the background of the phenomena. Sources include agendas and minutes of city and municipal councils.
Going through materials without proper tools is slow and difficult. Tight deadlines don’t make the work any easier as publications want to share information as much in real time as possible, especially as online news has become more common. Lingsoft provided Aamulehti with a solution: a robot journalist that can screen interesting topics from background materials and in this way speed up the work of journalists.
More time to write
Lingsoft’s robot journalist mainly monitors material from city and municipal councils and looks for relevant topics that Aamulehti has defined and that journalists and readers might find interesting. Like other Lingsoft solutions, the robot journalist can find keywords in all their conjugated forms. The solution also takes into account synonyms and close concepts, which significantly improves the quality of the analysis.
The robot journalist helps Aamulehti to keep up to date: It reviews the material immediately at the time of publication and reports the findings twice a day to the journalists’ email. The email contains a brief summary of each news item found and links to the original material. Journalists can quickly check if the documents include topics that would interest readers. By automating background work, journalists can focus on the writing process itself. In addition, the solution has helped to find information that would otherwise not have been found.
Lingsoft has developed the robot journalist in cooperation with Aamulehti, Svenska social- och Communalhögskolan which operates as a part of the University of Helsinki, and the Swedish company Journalist + +. The project was funded by the Media Industry Research Foundation of Finland.
