Washington Post bot gets a floor exercise in Rio

by Chava Gourarie, Columbia Journalism Review

BuzzFeed’s newest political reporter is a bot

by Benjamin Mullen, Poynter.

Are Russian News Media Getting a Boost from Retweet Bots on Twitter?

by Lawrence Alexander, GlobalVoices

NPR is building an analytics bot that emphasizes caring over clicks

by Benjamin Mullin, Poynter

This News-Writing Bot Is Now Free for Everyone

by Klint Finley, Wired

The Slack bot trend continues, this time with Al Jazeera English

by Gurman Bhatia, Poynter.org

The New York Times built a Slack bot to help decide which stories to post to social media

by Shan Wang, NiemanLab

This Twitter bot has one weird trick to create clickbait headlines

by John Teti, A.V. Club

Reddit’s Bit Of New Bot

I often spend time on /r/news and /r/worldnews. If you’ve spent time there, you’ll notice there’s a bot called Bit Of News which summarizes articles for you. Like this:

It only works, I think, on articles above a certain comment/like threshold. Here’s the code that it uses. But here’s what’s really, really smart. (@melodykramer, Social Media Desk at NPR)

It’s alive! What NPR learned from turning its @nprnews Twitter account from a bot into a human

During the five days of manual updating, there were 142,219 visits to NPR’s website from @nprnews tweets — a 45 percent increase from the average (98,213) of the five weeks leading up to the experiment, according to NPR’s Google Analytics data. Links tweeted by @nprnews were clicked on nearly 100,000 more times than links shared automatically the week before, information from its bit.ly account revealed. And the account gained 5,010 followers — about 14 percent more than the week before.

Lauren Katz, an NPR intern turned temp, led @nprnews during the weeklong test. The week before, she ran a smaller experiment of sorts by manually tweeting a handful of stories at night after they’d been tweeted out by the RSS feed earlier in the day. The tweets she wrote out received more engagement across the board, inspiring the longer trial. (Joseph Lichterman, Nieman Journalism Lab)