We’re serious journalists who understand audiences and analytics. But we see a plethora of story ideas — and people — in all of that data.

Most bots today are a simple one and done... draw a crowd, people play with them temporarily only to disregard them minutes later... a huge opportunity for those of us who can create a remarkable experience... Here are a couple of insights:

Instead of pushing news, it’s going to gather news. ... It’s not only going to tell you funny, interesting, and insightful stuff. (Although it will.) It’s also going to ask questions... depending on whether you’re a conventiongoer, a protester, or watching along at home. And it will use those reactions and inbound information to inform BuzzFeed Ne…

to connect with protesters and delegates on the ground ... and to experiment with what it looks like to deploy a bot as a reporting assistant.Now we’re delighted to share the code behind it:

One of the most critical elements to creating a great bot is copywriting. The right words can keep your users engaged for hours while the wrong ones will leave them running for the hills... Your chatbot should have a single minded focus and anything that does not adhere to this focus should be stripped away.

so far, there has been no killer bot... we’re only four months into this... I believe we’ll look back on the early emphasis on “conversational commerce” as a mistake... natural language processing and artificial intelligence are not yet accomplished at managing human-like conversations... instant interactions are key.

some examples of a blended interface, bringing the best of the command line and GUI paradigms together... — notifications and quick input from the conversational side, along with a rich and intuitive experience from the GUI side... Each message has the potential to be a ,,, bite size applications like a photo carousel, media players, mini games, i…

This new tool shows users what Facebook determines are their interests... has provided a glance into the deep flaws of Facebook’s interest targeting. Advertisers should be concerned about where their dollars are going... Here are the main flaws I came across:... I would just recommend approaching targeting differently:

In many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge... being in “search mode” on the Internet helps people feel smarter, despite their searches resulting in nothing due to filters blo…

MediaRadar said the average renewal rate for sponsor content this year is 21 percent.... Polar recently described renewal rates as “weak,”... We give the advertisers what our standards and ethics forever forbade — confusing our readers about the source of content — and then the advertisers wake up and say, ‘Well, that was fun. But we’re bored with…

The start of every day for me was Medium, I would import a story from the Buffer blog and edit it before publishing and then spending some time updating all of the tracking spreadsheets with the latest numbers, hoping for an indicator of what was working and what content should be posted tomorrow. Our top three Medium strategies were: Repost o…

in 2016, the criticism from Hannity and a vocal faction of the conservative news media reached a fever pitch... full-blown, searing criticism. Even figures like Ryan and Cruz, considered by most to have iron-clad conservative credentials, were no longer safe... an incidental twist, considering how Republicans helped foster the growth of the conser…

This is the future of mobile news, as Quartz envisions it. In the app, which launches today and is Quartz’s first, you don’t read the news; you chat with it.

as news outlets tailor their content to addictive platforms to pump up traffic, the distinction between consuming journalism and being wedded to “emails, constant notifications, and social media” is increasingly meaningless... if we are what and how we read, then our thinking will mirror the scattered and shallow tendencies of Web browsing.... …

publishers are afraid that while the AMP project is nominally open-source, Google is using it to shape how the mobile web works, and in particular, to ensure a steady stream of advertising revenue

quality filter setting ... can improve the quality of Tweets you see by using a variety of signals, such as account origin and behavior... filters lower-quality content, like duplicate Tweets or content that appears to be automated, from your notifications and other parts of your Twitter experience. It does not filter content from people you follo…

my view of the many different types of visualizations available to us when we encode and present data... We’ve plotted nearly 90 different graphics across five main categories: Distribution, Time, Comparing Categories, Geospatial, Part-to-Whole, and Relationships. The space does not include every type of graphic, nor does it display every link bet…

The Guardian joins the Financial Times and the Economist in billing ads by time.... have found, unsurprisingly, that ads perform better when people spend more engaged time with them.... click-through rate as an industry benchmark for performance;. However a metric of 0.0 something percent should not be seen as a succes

My first experiment with blogging on facebook

IT’S been just over four months since The New York Times started producing live video for Facebook... a lot should never have made the team... many that are either plagued by technical malfunctions, feel contrived, drone on too long, ignore audience questions or are simply boring... For The Times the goal is twofold... to develop video that appea…

a lot of media sources you don’t recognize ... a new and distinctive sort of operation ... political news and advocacy pages made specifically for Facebook... engineered to reach audiences exclusively in the news feed... Occupy Democrats; The Angry Patriot; US Chronicle... together make up 2016’s most disruptive, and least understood, force in med…

a research paper ... found depressing proof that the web is fuelling segregation.... matched the attitudes of those who did and did not have broadband with data on partisan hostility... Greater use of the web ensured that an admirer of Jon Stewart would think that conservatives were not just mistaken but stupid, or a viewer of Fox News would wor…

Content creators everywhere ... are all suffering from the results of peak content... the information age is arriving at its natural conclusion and we’re all drowning in it... most content under-performing, it’s also getting harder for people who produce really good content to get attention. Engagement... is steadily dropping ... what happens to e…

Deepstream makes it easy to remix one or more livestreams by adding context and background... by introducing a new role into the livestreaming ecosystem: the curator... easily embed live video into a player that includes context cards... set up with just a few clicks to feature news stories, polls, maps, tweets, free text and more to help you expl…

image... apparently shows the spread of radiation from the Fukushima nuclear accident... being shared widely ... despite the fact that it... shows the wave height of the tsunami... you might want to doublecheck before hitting Share... here’s how

In response to "The Tyranny of Agile"... Don’t get me wrong — in theory it sounds great to release half-checked, bug-ridden websites for your users to check in the name of agile... But websites delivering actual governmental services really badly IRL can ruin people’s lives...

three days after Instagram debuted Stories... publishers of every stripe have pounced on the opportunity to show off some more off-beat storytelling sensibilities.

covering trials can be tricky... trials don’t always unfold in orderly narratives. Instead, they develop in fits and starts, depending on which witnesses are called and which exhibits the prosecution and defense choose to enter.... attorneys don't actually build narrative... The challenge... to create a way to track those arguments as they're made…

summary of Kevin Kelly’s Seminar “The Next 30 Digital Years”, ... part of The Long Now Foundation’s Seminars About Long-term Thinking. a dozen “inevitable” trends will drive the next 30 years of digital progress...

we frequently receive emails from a whole range of people asking how they can start doing the sort of online open-source investigation and verification that they’ve seen us doing. The skills and methodologies used are all something that can be learnt through a little persistence, but here are a few pieces of advice to get you started.