NB: Written in 2018: - We’ve seen a 25 per cent decrease of journalists in Sweden in recent years. There are no longer enough journalists to do what journalists should do, said Robin Govik, Chief Digital Officer at MittMedia.se, Sweden’s leading local media company at the annual conference of Norwegian Online News Association (NONA) in 2018.

In 2015 the company started experimenting with robot journalism.

Not necessarily to replace journalists with robots, but to broaden its coverage and provide coverage of things journalists wouldn’t normally cover or have the capacity to write a zillion stories on – such as all individual property sales in a given neighbourhood, the weather, local businesses and local sports matches (including in lower divisions   newspapers wouldn’t normally cover).

• More about MittMedia’s sports robot Rosalinda here (in Swedish).

The company started its property service, where robots write all the copy, in September 2017, and within four months robots had written more than 10,000 articles on property sales.

According to a survey by MittMedia.se, conducted among 102 readers, 68 per cent of respondents said they didn’t notice articles had been written by a robot.

Among the reasons Govik thinks the future of journalism is humanoid, are the opportunities for personalisation and hyperlocal content.

More about the homeowners bot here, and in this video.

Govik gave a talk on a similar topic at this year’s SXSW in Austin, some highlights here.