
La Voz de Galicia: Your local digest
Two projects which enable journalists to identify and publish stories that are most relevant to local audiences.
Archant, a local UK newspaper publisher, is monetising historical news stories with Local Recall. Bringing together intelligent voice infrastructure and chatbot functionalities, the publisher digitised its 150-year-old archive to create a voice-activated news service.
Local Recall launched in August 2020 with over a century’s worth of Eastern Daily Press news stories. In just a few weeks, the service accumulated over 300 paying subscribers. Today, with a team of over 900 volunteers, it will soon be available across a further 54 titles, showing how important local news still is to the community.
Local Recall lets users ask questions about past events, access archived stories and hear responses from voice-activated devices such as Google Home. Archant’s Chief Client Officer Lorna Willis says the team of volunteers has created “one of the most advanced voice infrastructures in the UK” by manually digitising damaged archives that even the most advanced scanners could not achieve.
Archant is freely offering Local Recall technology to competitors. Its long-term goal is to see other publishers use the tool for their own content. As Willis sees it, “If local content isn’t available where people want it, when they want it, we’re planning the collective demise of local news publishing.”
Two projects which enable journalists to identify and publish stories that are most relevant to local audiences.
Local News Engine uses algorithms to generate leads for potential news stories from local data.Now complete, it is available to all via GitHub.
Tagesspiegel LEUTE provides digital local news to subscribers in 12 districts of Berlin.
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