Stylebot

I am the founder of Stylebot, a first-of-its-kind copy editing chatbot. Our team is a member of the Viterbi Startup Garage’s Fall 2019 cohort. The original version of the bot, which we call Amy the Stylebot, launched in the Slack workspace for Annenberg’s student newsroom in November 2017 and is now used in newsrooms and classrooms across the country. A colleague and I researched the bot’s educational effects, finding that students enjoy the convenience and customization of the bot over using a book for copy editing.

The Rundown

I’ve helped push Annenberg students beyond traditional storytelling formats by overseeing the creation of a cross-platform news weekly digest on email, Instagram Stories and Alexa called The Rundown. The Instagram show has since won third place in the BEA Disrupt the News Challenge, while a “news fluency” experiment we ran in our newsletter won second place in the app category of AEJMC’s Best of Web competition.

Trusting News

Throughout my career, I’ve focused on getting journalists to approach their work in new ways and update their conventions. During my time at USC, I’ve aimed that focus on helping students optimize for earning audience trust in an environment where trust in the American news media has eroded. I led the student newsroom’s participation in RJI’s Trusting News project, where students and faculty conducted research and tested trust strategies over the course of two semesters. Now, I serve as a Trusting News coach, helping newsrooms all over the country apply some of the techniques my students and I tested. Any journalist can request a coaching session here.

Annie

I taught a product development class at Annenberg where a student pitched an app for our newsroom, and the app, Annie, launched in December 2019. You can read more about the development process here, here and here.

Newsroom management and experimentation

In addition to these projects, day to day I manage digital production in USC Annenberg’s student newsroom, which serves hundreds of students. In my time there, I have implemented a workflow and structure for digital, hired student and faculty managers, developed policies and best practices for the website and social media and expanded the number of digital platforms where the students publish (among them: text alerts, newsletters, WeChat and Alexa). I also teach classes on native social media storytelling, product development and audience engagement. I’ve also led a directed research on narrative gaming. I encourage students in the newsroom and in my classes to challenge convention and experiment with new storytelling formats. My students write about their experiments in the newsroom and my classes here.