The demand for quality local news, holding power to account and keeping audiences informed and engaged, is higher than ever. RADAR is a new service which harnesses the power of technology to deliver incisive, fact-based news stories to local media across the UK and Ireland. It brings together PA, the national news agency with over 150 years' experience in supplying quality content, and Urbs Media, a tech driven start up using a combination of reporters and automation to mass localise news. Reports And Data and Robots (RADAR) is a global first in successfully combining humans and machine to scale up local news production across core local news pillars such as; health, education, crime, transport, housing and environment. RADAR is moving towards a full market launch and is expected to be able to create 30,000 localised stories each month. Register for this webinar where PA's Editor-in-Chief, Pete Clifton and RADAR's Alan Renwick will outline the details of the service; how the technology works, the content topics, the assets we'll be producing and the ways in which news outlets can access and use the service.

Both humans and robots make mistakes, but bots are quicker, cheaper, and don't require 401K retirement plans or medical insurance. As part of an international trend toward machine-written news reporting, Google is giving the United Kingdom's Press Association an $800,000 award to create robot journalists. The use of artificial intelligence is expected to help the overseas Press Association to churn out 30,000 additional articles every month. The award was announced on July 6. Lucy A. Dalglish, dean and professor at the University of Maryland journalism school, said that robots are spreading to newsrooms around the globe, especially to write stories about sporting events, which are data-driven stories.

If you thought human journalists were too biased in their reporting, maybe robots will be better. We rejoiced when automation meant the more efficient production of the Ford Model T. We applauded when artificial intelligence bested humans at games and trivia. We nodded solemnly as machines began to replace fast-food workers and supermarket cashiers. And now, we may not know exactly how to react as computers take over our jobs as news writers. Few jobs these days are truly safe from the rise of AI and the latest industry to be affected is journalism.

Google has today awarded €706,000 ($800,000) to the UK's Press Association to develop robot reporters that can crank out 30,000 articles a month for local newspapers and bloggers. The cash injection is part of the advertising goliath's €150m Digital News Initiative, a three-year program that allegedly supports European journalism through technology (or, rather, helps websites get more readers and thus shift more Google ads). Now in its third and final year, the fund will bankroll 107 projects in 27 countries to the tune of €22m ($25m) in 2017. The Press Association project – codenamed RADAR, or Reporters and Data and Robots – will be a collaborative effort with Urbs Media, a UK startup that specializes in automated data journalism. The Press Association is Blighty's equivalent of America's Associated Press – a roving newswire that feeds stories to publications.

The number of incidents in the UK involving drones reported to police has increased more than twelve-fold over the past two years. Complaints, including allegations of snooping, burglary "scoping" exercises, mid-air near-misses and the smuggling of contraband into prisons, rose to almost 10 a day (3,456) last year, compared with 283 in 2014. Last year's figure was almost three times higher than the 2015 total of 1,237 incidents. The true total is likely to be even higher as the data, obtained by the Press Association through freedom of information requests, was not available for all UK forces. Sales of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), available for as as little as £30 and often containing built-in cameras, have risen sharply in recent years but as their popularity has increased so have concerns about their use.