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Case Study

How News.de Automates Daily Reports

News.de (1)

Daily Updated Reporting

Numerous up-to-date reports are generated daily for a variety of categories.

Relief of Employees

The automation of daily reports relieves employees enormously.

Providing of More Local and Specific News

Through automation, news.de stands out from other newspapers and can offer its readers more local and specific information.

The Case

The online news portal news.de reports daily on the latest news, headlines, photos, and videos from a wide variety of departments. Readers can follow current events, important press conferences, and sporting highlights in the live ticker on the homepage. In addition, news.de set itself to publish up-to-date, high-quality reports on the latest developments during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, the company needed content for a large number of categories. It was important that they were created and updated on a daily basis.

The Challenge

It is not possible for the staff of news.de to manually write repetitive reports for a large number of categories.

Their goals:

  • Fast and accurate access to information for readers
  • Daily and up to date reporting
  • Reduce employee workload

Traditionally being a publisher focusing on national and international headlines, news.de was able to implement its first large-scale local news coverage thanks to the data-handling infrastructure provided by DataCater. Encouraged by the achievements, we will further expand upon the capabilities of DataCater, AX Semantics, and its potential for content production at scale on a broader range of topics.

André Tschachtli, CTO, news.de

The Solution

news.de knew it had to find a way to produce an enormous amount of news reports each day. The company decided to use AX Semantics' software for automated content creation.

  1. Automation of daily reports

    news.de can automate its news with the content automation software from AX Semantics. For example, the daily coverage of the COVID-19 virus was automated based on structured data from the Robert Koch Institute. In this case, news.de used DataCater to set up the data pipelines that extracted data from various APIs of the Robert Koch Institute, prepared it for text production, and sent it to the AX Semantics NLG Cloud. From the data, AX Semantics NLG Cloud automatically generated optimized texts that were sent to news.de's content management system.

  2. Increasing the quality, accuracy and speed of reporting

    With the help of content automation software from AX Semantics, the company can provide its readers with faster and more accurate access to information in a wide range of categories. For example, with Corona Reporting, daily reports on current incidence, deaths, new infections, ICU bed occupancy, and incidence trends over the past 6/7 days were generated at the touch of a button for each of the more than 400 districts. In addition, there were daily reports provided on the situation in the individual federal states, on the incidence of infection in Germany, on the current vaccination status in Germany, and the federal states with a vaccination overview. news.de also generated incidence figures for the districts per federal state and offered its readers overview tables with the most important figures.

  3. Reducing the workload for employees

    The news.de employees could not manually write the required daily reports on current news, headlines, photos, and videos from the most diverse categories because the workload would be too significant. Automated reporting relieves employees of a lot of work.
News-Beispieltext
Example of a generated German report about Covid-19 numbers and regulations

The Results

By using AX Semantics to automate COVID-19 reports, news.de delivered more than 25,000 article updates for more than 400 regions in Germany and reached a local audience of more than 800,000 new visitors per month. Using DataCater to build and manage data pipelines, news.de saves approximately 40% of the time otherwise spent manually building code. This leads to robustness in the data preparation processes.

News.de

news.de is a German-language and national and independent news portal founded in 2008. The tabloid journalistic portal presents its content in various multimedia formats such as text articles, videos, photos, and blogs.
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