Automated journalism: Retresco generates automatically written game reports

Ten thousands of game reports in real-time – from Champions League to district league: a paradise for millions of passionate football fans. Automated journalism by Retresco makes it possible.

Solutions by Retresco enhance, accelerate and remarkably reduce the price of the whole value chain-process. Together with football-marketer and developer of online-sportmedia Sportplatz Media, Retresco aims for a quantitative and qualitative jump in automated journalism and is looking for nothing more than market-leadership in this sector.

Football is moving millions of people. Next to the pitch as well as in the media: Football fans are highly engaged and loyal. Results from the last games are a very common and loved topic at the beginning of every week and often the sport news coverage gives impulses.

People are looking for more and faster game reports just like news-rooms in online and print media.

For that reason, Berlin based semantic-specialist Retresco and Hamburg based expert for online sport media Sportplatz Media partnered for one unique enterprise. They combine on the one hand their linguistic-technological competence and on the other an enormous expertise as a developer and marketer of regional sports-media. This partnership enables them to make a huge step in automatically generated game reports.

This is how automated journalism by Retresco works:

While until now, editors and journalists had to write game reports by hand, they now can just access as many texts as they want within minutes. These texts are products of the so called “robot journalism”. They are created by a textengine developed by Retresco and are being read like a report written by a human sports caster.

Basis of these reports are structured data from leagues, games and teams. Every generated report is unique. The editor can either adopt these reports unchanged or improve them with opinions, multimedia and other background information that cannot be found in data. The results are excellent:

1. Fully written texts instead of monotone tables and results increase reading fun and therefore exposure time and reader loyalty.
2. Online-platforms get considerably more comprehensive – also lower leagues can be covered
3. Topicality increases, because lacking editorial capacities – especially during weekends – are no more a boundary
4. Unique texts enhance relevance in search engines and therefore give platforms and publishers a cutting edge in terms of their ranking in Google & Co.
5. Data exchange via API in media neutral format limits technical effort
6. Comfortable processing in online content management systems or print editorial systems

More games – more teams – more leagues – more people

“The automated generation of game reports is just a consequent extension of our solutions for content automation and give our customers and us new innovative perspectives.
Besides football game reports, we also work on other topics within and outside of journalism” says Johannes Sommer, CEO of Retresco. “We are glad to have found a competent and strong partner, who provides us with the necessary football- and branch-knowledge” continues Sommer.

„As a provider of portal solutions for sports- and especially football-coverage, we know all the challenges of publishers in the area of sports. Game-reports are bringing most of the traffic to publishers, but unfortunately capacities do not allow area-wide coverage. Automatically generated game reports deliver a solution to this very problem. Due to our editorial experience and roots, our demands towards automatically generated texts are extremely high. With Retresco we have found a partner who shares these high demands and implements them on the highest possible level“ says Sportplatz Media CEO Marcel Hager.