Authory creates a writer’s portfolio – automagically

If you’re a journalist or writer, an AI-created portfolio of your contributions on the internet may come in handy.

Authory can automatically create a portfolio for writers

If you’re a journalist or writer, an AI-created portfolio of your contributions on the internet may come in handy. That’s what Authory.com offers to any scribe of any type using its artificial intelligence engine. It’s suited mainly to freelancers.

Join up, and Authory scrapes the internet for everything you have written. In my case it found more than 800 stories, past and present, and created a website based on them without me doing a thing. I had private access to the content.

Am I happy about this? The answer is ‘yes’ and ‘no’.

On the one hand it is invaluable to have a complete portfolio of your work, past and present, whether it be for a backup, as a resource for research, or for promoting yourself at your next job interview.

Authory not only backs up your articles, but lets you make it available to the public if you change the privacy settlings. You can then accumulate readers on its site and they will receive notifications about a new article that has been published anywhere in your name. It gives you an email subscription tool.

Authory also offers you detailed analytics of the likes, tweets and comments received about your articles on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. “Our hard numbers give you irrefutable evidence of your reach. And that makes you substantially more attractive for any career move in the future,” it says. Be aware the count includes only eyeballs of your stories accessed through Authory, not the original publication.

Authory founder Eric Hauch

I was impressed at what Authory achieved in my case. It found articles and other contributions I had written but didn’t confuse them with pieces written by other Chris Griffiths, and there are a few of us who are scribes That’s because you nominate the sources Authory crawls.

“Authory gives you the superpowers you need to take control of your articles, build your own audience and advance your career, regardless of where you publish,” its PR says.

The worrying side is that Authory manages to get behind paywalls to scoop up what you have written. Even if you are the only one who can read it, that sounds to me like stealing content. When asked, Hauch said he had engaged lawyers to clarify this, but copyright law can vary country to country. What’s okay in Berlin, may not be okay here. Also, if you don’t have copyright to pieces you have written for others, you have a legal problem.

You can set permissions in Authory so that only you see the text of what Authory has scraped; others see a sign-up form for the paywalled site, and can view the original story at its source if they have legal access to it, provide you set the permissions correctly in your account. You can set permissions so that only you see your contents, and not anyone else. Authory details these permissions here. 

That’s why I think Authory is best left as a freelancer tool. It looks invaluable for backing up and compiling a portfolio of work, provided it is not breaching copyright.

Authory was set up by Eric Hauch, who says he is a former Financial Times Germany and Axel Springer publishing house worker in Berlin. Previous ventures include running a news aggregation service focused on comments, columns and editorials instead of generic news, and developing a software-as-a-service solution for increasing reader retention.

Mr Hauch says Authory was launched three years ago and is expanding its reach. “We are basically you know, growing this organically,” he says. Authory has “several thousand” paying customers – journalists, writers, bloggers and “thought leaders”.

Mr Hauch says Authory sometimes monitors more than 100 sources for a single subscriber.

He says users can create dynamic rules that automatically create collections of their stories that have items in common.

“You can select all articles from a certain source with a certain keyword to go into this collection, or into that collection. You can basically mix and match with all automated rules, or you can also manually create collections.”

He says that when collecting data, the AI system automatically “understands” an article when it sees it and understands who has written it; this reduces the workload of what is otherwise “a fairly small team”.

Mr Hauch provides more details of the service here.

Authory offers a free 14-day trial, then it is $US10 ($13.32) per month or $US96 ($127.82) for a year’s subscription. But be aware of what we have said about Authory’s methodology.