Local newspapers, under pressure from falling advertising revenue and circulation are to get a boost from an unlikely source, Google.

The Press Association collects and distributes news, it’s been doing so for around 150 years. Through the PA, provincial newspapers can report national stories. Google has offered the PA over £600,000 to develop a system to automatically generate news stories from publicly accessible databases working with developer Urbs Media. It is thought that this new Reporters And Data And Robots (Radar) software could generate up to 30,000 news stories per month.

The US based Associated Press already offer computer generated stories tagged Automated Insights.