How Reuters uses new technology to tell stories

Mădălina Ciobanu of Journalism.co.uk writes about how Reuters is using new technology to tell stories for its clients.

Ciobanu writes, “The large availability of raw financial information has changed readers’ demands and expectations from financial reporting, she explained.

“Reuters has developed a suite of tools internally, to automate the process of gathering news and data to allow its journalists to focus on the kind of things computers can’t perform, such as building relationships with sources and providing reporting that looks beyond the surface.

“The suite includes: Live Data, a tool that gathers real-time information, performs calculations and ‘puts numbers into prose’, thus making the job of a market reporter easier; FastWire, which automatically supplies the relevant metadata to a piece; and Leap, which translates keywords into multiple languages.

“Reuters also has developed a beta version of a platform called News Tracer, where reporters can get tips on breaking news early by identifying collections of related tweets and using an algorithm to assign posts a confidence score to determine how likely they are to be true.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.