POLITICO Europe launches Pro Intelligence platform to empower reporting on EU policies

Snapshot from Pro Intelligence

New monitoring technology by POLITICO Europe will offer a ‘deeper insight' into EU legislation, stakeholders and policy developments that can become a great resource for reporters.

Launched in September, Pro Intelligence is the latest product of the political news organisation’s premium subscription service, POLITICO Pro.

Pro Intelligence is informed by a database of more than 24 million votes, 700,000 amendments, 16,000 legislators, and 7 million searchable items from the UK, Germany and France, archiving back to the first European Parliament session in 1979, with more countries to come.

The user is able to filter the information down to their specific needs, by using interactive features to see vote breakdown, visualisations and mapping, MEP voting behaviour comparisons, and instant amendment searching.

Johannes Boege, chief product officer, POLITICO Europe said the subscription model uses the recently acquired monitoring technology of Statehill Inc. to facilitate journalists, amongst other professions, to make quick, informed decisions from one location, rather than trawling through the data sets themselves.

"Pro Intelligence’s power lies in the unique way we channel, select and present these enormous datasets, reducing their complexity in the most meaningful way for our users," he said.

"We further enrich and decode these datasets with insightful technology such as Natural Language Processing, which allows us to add another meaningful layer to the data, providing insight not immediately evident by looking at the data alone."

Legislation timelines are one example of a feature within the user's dashboard which can help a user track changes to bills, but visualisations are also an easy way to understand broader contexts which can be presented through graphs, pie charts, and geographical representations and downloaded for their own use.

Geographical visualisation on Pro Intelligence

Depending on the type of story a journalist might be tracking, they are able to stay up-to-date with developments by setting up customisable notifications based on keywords, and synchronise it to an in-built calendar.

Transcriptions of debates are also linked to MEP fact-files, which can also breakdown their activities, questions, voting records, attendance and a timeline of tweets, allowing the user to run comparisons to MEP’s in other parties and countries.

These are just some of the interactive features of Pro Intelligence which is designed to save journalists time and effort. Request a demo and give it a go yourself.

Want to know how AI can be your best friend in the newsroom? Find out how on 7 November at our Newsrewired conference at Reuters, London.

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