The Google Digital News Initiative program invested $800,000 in the development of the Reporters and Data and Robots (RADAR) project, which is run by the British news agency The Press Association. The essence of the project is to unite robot journalists who will independently write articles based on information collected on the Web.
RADAR will be launched as early as next year. The bots are expected to generate up to 30,000 posts each month. At the moment five people are working on the creation of the project, whose tasks include debugging the automation of bots to collect information on medicine, incidents, politics and many other spheres.
It is expected that RADAR will be able to help online publications create interesting clickable content, which in turn will allow the sites to attract additional audiences and earn advertising revenue.
Pete Clifton, editor of The Press Association, said that professional journalists will not be out of work, but bots will help significantly increase the volume of news items to a level that even a well-coordinated team can’t handle.
Bots are already running in some major media outlets, but they still require editing and fact-checking – the program can’t always tell the difference between real news and a joke, for example, so it still needs human supervision.
