Second mission for Keystone SDA writing robot Lena
On referendum Sunday, the Keystone-SDA news agency deployed its writing bot, Lena, for the second time. This time, Lena wrote not only about the federal referendum but also about selected cantonal and municipal initiatives.
Lena is programmed to analyze the voting data from the Federal Statistical Office (FSO) and produce automated reports from it. The robot relies on text templates provided by journalists.
Around 2200 each Messages in German and French on all municipalities were created in this way on Sunday afternoon. As with the votes in November 2018, the municipal reports described the result of the only national proposal, the urban sprawl initiative, and classified it if there were any anomalies.
In addition, the German-language municipal reports now also showed the outcome of the most important proposals at the cantonal level and the position of the voters in the municipality. Individual municipal results were also included. This provided the reader with all the important information on voting Sunday in a nutshell, tailored to one location.
Basic service as a foundation
In the cantonal and municipal area, the Lena texts were strongly oriented to the Keystone SDA text service, for which around two dozen journalists were on duty throughout Switzerland. They followed the votes and elections in their cantons, compiled the results as quickly as possible and used their local knowledge to weight the results. Lena relied on this.
Thanks to the in-house development Lena, it is possible to offer customers overview reports on each individual municipality, which was unthinkable until recently, Keystone-SDA wrote in a statement on Monday. The technology opens up new possibilities in the news agency's service portfolio. Jann Jenatsch, head of content, says: "Robot-generated reports are part of everyday life at many news agencies internationally. In talks, we now want to find out where we can support our customers with our know-how, be it in the next elections and votes, but also in other areas."
However, the use of Lena and Co. is also being driven forward internally, for example to increase speed. "Tools like Lena should support our journalists in their daily work. For example, they can help our people to be even faster," says Jenatsch.
