Automating the COVID-19 story in the newsroom
Carmen Aguilar García · 2024
This chapter describes the development and implementation of a data automation system to track the COVID-19 pandemic at Sky News. The system was developed by a data journalist and a software engineer to help journalists in the company navigate through an overwhelming rise of datasets that updated daily while grappling with new scientific knowledge and a complex political situation. The first section of this chapter describes the urgent context in which this project was developed. The second section delves into the three main steps to build the system: research of the data sources; data collection, cleaning, and structuring, and the transformation of a database into stories and visualisations. The third section reflects on the impact this system had on the data team and the newsroom. By using automation, we speeded up the data process, increasing efficiency and enabling journalists to allocate more time to creative processes. The chapter concludes opening up the conversation to show how automation is still in the “to-do list” of many news organisations in a moment when the media industry is witnessing the emergence of generative artificial intelligence, which has been called the main significant change in the media industry since the advent of the Internet.