Financial news site Quartz has created a bot that can break news, reports Ricardo Bilton of the Nieman Lab.
Bilton writes, “At the Online News Association conference next month, Quartz plans to unveil a suite of Slack-based tools designed to simplify the process of creating bots to follow certain pages or data. With the tool, a local crime reporter, could, for example, create a bot that monitors the local police department’s website and alerts them whenever there’s an update. Technology and finance reporters could do the same with bots that monitor SEC filings. Quartz is building the tools, which it teased last year, thanks to the $250,000 grant it got from the Knight Foundation in late 2016.
“John Keefe, head of Quartz’s Bot Studio, said that the planned tools are part of the same spirit of Quartz that created Chartbuilder, a once-internal Quartz tool that the organization has since opened up to other news organizations. Ditto for Quartz’s Atlas, which the site launched in 2015 to let users share and discover charts.
“‘There will always be room for these kinds of bespoke ‘let’s watch this particular thing or aspect of the world and write something on what we find’ kinds of stories. Those will always be around, and you’ll only see more of them as more journalists become aware of the possibilities.'”
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