Immersive Automation: automated storytelling, audience engagement and user experience in a news ecosystem

Publishers are downsizing newsrooms and reducing resources needed for producing engaging content, especially content consumed by smaller communities. Without local customized content there can be no local revenues. At the same time the input for news, ie. public and private data, is to an increasing degree published openly in digital format, but journalists and editors are lacking competence in processing this digital data on a large scale. There is a need for a new breed of “meta journalists” that are able to work with scalable datadriven content. Media companies are also collecting vast amounts of user data, but lack the skills to combine them with journalistic content and advertisements to create a seamless and engaging user experience. We are bringing forward a solution to these problems. We suggest automation of editorial processes involving the gathering, production and distribution of content of engaging news, especially over smartphones and emerging mobile devices. This allows for new opportunities in the media business, attracting entrepreneurial efforts. It also assists conceptual changes in current media companies. Our aim is to create a road map and a demonstration of a future news ecosystem based on automated storytelling and intense audience engagement and user experience. Stories powered by data and machine learning will lead to a dramatically more personal and customized news experience with localisation of content as a key feature.