Reporters and robots are proving a winning partnership for a local media group, generating both clicks and subs.

An automated content project at Schibsted’s Polaris Media in rural Norway aimed at driving subscription sales was already showing remarkable results, achieving a conversion on every second to third robot-written article.

But when texts are manually enhanced – with a snappier headline, a quote or an image – the figure is 1.25 to two subscription sales per article.

United Robots chief marketing officer Cecilia Campbell says in an INMA ‘big data for news publishers’ blog that the approach has helped deliver enough relevant content to attract and keep paying subscribers, even in a local newsroom of only a few journalists.

“Real estate sales and local business had been top-scoring topics of interest among readers for the past few years,” she says. “So the team set out to explore how to give readers more of what they were looking for, using robots as newsroom resources.”

Automated articles about house sales include top lists of most expensive houses sold in the area in the past year, as well as price comparisons across communities.

An automated content project is now running at titles in Midt-Norge, one of Polaris Media’s five regions. Of the 14 titles in the region, ten are now live with automated content on house sales and short summaries of the annual reports of local companies, with the rest of the titles to follow.

With newsrooms varying in size from a single journalist to ten or 12 journalists, it used only to be possible to cover a fraction of the stories now published automatically. “Take house sales,” says project editor Bjørn Rønningen. “With robot-generated articles, we can now provide a complete picture and believe we thereby contribute to more well-informed real estate markets locally.”

All the Midt-Norge titles that are live with automated content publish all the articles the robots generate. Campbell says it’s then up to each editor to decide whether to spend time on picking out stories of particular interest and enhance them, by rewriting the headline, phoning up a source to get a quote, or adding an image.

Rønningen (pictured) moved to the project role last year from being editor of weekly Hitra-Frøya, and has recently also taken on the editorship of Stjørdals-Nytt while the incumbent takes maternity leave. He says manually enhancing the articles has a positive effect on how they perform with readers, “which is a useful insight for us.

“But of course, there’s a balance to be struck – in a newsroom of one journalist there may not be enough benefit to warrant the time spent editing the automated texts.”

The initial data is showing remarkable results, although Rønningen admits that this may be partially because the content is new. “We don’t expect the conversion level to remain quite as high,” he says, “but nevertheless, we fully expect to get ROI through subscription sales alone.

“Any extra ad impressions are bonus on top.”

Titles have a dedicated section for the real estate and local business content, with a carousel on each home page showing the three or four most recently published texts in addition to special interest ones added manually. Work underway will help readers find the stories most relevant to them.

“With some 1,000 articles coming in every month, readers don’t necessarily see the ones that are closest to home for them, so we’re looking at creating a map or search function that will allow them to sort the real estate content on geography, price, date of sale. And similarly for the business content – making it searchable on size, industry, date. “

But while driving conversions was the primary objective of the Polaris project, freeing up reporter time was a clear secondary goal.

“We’ve been very clear internally,” says Rønningen. “We’re using automation in order to be able to publish large volumes of attractive content, but also in order to let journalists focus on our actual journalism.”