Keystone-SDA wins the EANA Award of Excellence in News Agency Quality 2019

News agencies ANA-MPA (Greece), APA (Austria), ATA (Albania), Keystone-SDA (Switzerland) and TASS (Russia) have submitted applications for the EANA Award of Excellence in News Agency Quality 2019. During the debates in the EANA Board on the topic of the EANA Award, Peter Kropsch, EANA’s President and CEO of dpa (Germany), mentioned that “the awarded project should solve a relevant problem in an innovative way, should be applicable to other members, should take into consideration a turnover vs cost analysis, and should also extend coverage”.

The winner of the EANA Award of Excellence in News Agency Quality 2019 is Mr Stefan Trachsel, who led Keystone-SDA’s project that was submitted for the Award.

As Keystone-SDA’s application reads, “in autumn 2018, Mr Trachsel, supported by a small team, developed a text-generation robot for the coverage of popular votes in Switzerland. The robot - named 'Lena' - contributed to the quality of our newswire output by extending coverage of Swiss popular votes to the local level. In November 2018 and February 2019, Lena created and published almost 9,000 short articles in German and French. These articles described the voting result of every single one of the approximately 2,200 Swiss communes and added context to the result. KEYSTONE SDA was never able to deliver such hyperlocal content to its customers before. Prior to Lena, KEYSTONE SDA's content was limited to the national and regional level. Lena's unique design makes it possible to adapt it for usage in different settings. After the initial usage in the November 2018 and February 2019 popular votes, the Lena framework has also been used by a different team in a regional election. The goal here was to improve speed of news delivery.”

The winner, Mr Stefan Trachsel (Keystone-SDA, Switzerland) will be invited to take part in the EANA Conference and General Assembly 2019 in Prague, and will receive a prize of 1000 euros, a symbolic gift and the EANA Award for Excellence in News Agency Quality 2019 official diploma, signed by the President of EANA.